On April 11, the Quebec government tabled Bill 57, which bears the title of An Act to protect elected officials and to promote the unhindered exercise of their functions.
My colleague, Professor Pierre Trudel, presented an overview of the consequences of such legislative provisions (The duty of May 14, 2024). Newspaper publishers and the media have also exposed the dangers to freedom of expression of these legislative provisions (see The Press of May 15, 2024).
But it is important to highlight other issues linked to the existence of this law.
The official goal of the project: to protect local elected officials from threats, harassment and other conduct that makes it almost impossible to carry out their mandate. Noble motive, to which we can only subscribe. But is it possible, however, that, in doing so, the difficult balance between freedom of expression and the protection of institutions has been broken?
In this regard, it is important to remember that local elected officials, like all public figures, must be able to be the subject of criticism that would perhaps not be admissible for “ordinary” people. They must agree to live “under the watchful eye of the public”, to quote the judges of the highest Canadian court.
Finally, it should be remembered that freedom of expression also protects the public’s right to information, constitutional protection not only affecting the speaker, but also the listener who, especially in the development of public policies, must have sufficient information to be able to participate in the democratic game.
In fact, this bill is part of a long sequence of measures where symbolic violence (the force of the law, the authority of the courts) attempts to impose a certain vision of the development of society.
Thus, when the Legault government grants the two municipal unions a subsidy of 1 million dollars each to support the elected officials allegedly defamed or harassed while the said unions have at the same time become strong defenders of wind energy development in agricultural or inhabited territory and while social debates are, on this point, intense, noisy, inconvenient for the zealots of such projects.
The “elective affinities” that seem to be emerging between this bill and the energy objectives of the Legault government are therefore troubling.
The logic of the arsonist firefighter?
Having personally tasted this medicine, I can testify to the dangerous shortcuts taken by certain elected officials who associate any public criticism with defamation by distorting the ordinary meaning of words or by attacking allegorical inferences or the crudeness of language. of the speaker. This game of formal notice as a means of intimidation is well known and was used against a citizen of Trois-Rivières who had criticized the competence of a civil servant or against citizens of Sainte-Pétronille who had dared to sign a petition against the engagement of a civil servant. The law therefore risks creating an “atmosphere” unfavorable to any genuine democratic debate. This is undoubtedly the inhibiting effect that the authors of this law want.
When added to the economic violence of wind farm promoters who attempt to break the use of collective actions by demanding, ten years after the fact, a million dollars from citizens who had contested such a project, there is reason to question oneself. Indeed, this synchrony of legal and economic means brings to light other motives justifying such a bill.
Moreover, it is not by making a simple argument with an elected official an offense punishable by a hefty fine that we advance the democratic debate…
Conduct a review of democratic practices in local municipalities
In the whole debate surrounding the installation of thousands of wind turbines near residences in the St. Lawrence Valley, what deeply shocked the populations was undoubtedly the absence of transparency, the extreme confidentiality maintained by local elected officials on all aspects of this project. This democracy, sick with this lack of transparency, unfortunately does not only affect energy projects.
To mention just one, let’s talk about these famous caucuses where the elected officials really make the decisions while the public meetings are often botched in less than an hour and where we see the advisors transform into voting robots, without explanations, without discussions, without possibilities for citizens to intervene other than a brief period of questions at the end of the meeting and when the decisions have already been made.
Let us also mention the case of this municipality refusing the publication in its municipal bulletin of a paid announcement about the holding of a public meeting on a development project, that of this mayor offering a citizen who asked too many questions go “settle it in the parking lot”, that of these MRCs which increasingly appropriate the skills of local municipalities, but who hold their meetings most of the time in front of empty rooms and who make no effort to make their decisions understandable or work to stimulate citizen participation.
Do we not see behind these behaviors the triumph of bureaucratic logic?
Is it not this same logic that explains the fear of any referendum or any exercise of direct democracy?
Could these gaps in the democratic life of our communities be unrelated to the radicalization of public discourse? Using justice to try to define the contours of a discourse acceptable to elected officials is an illusory, if not grotesque, attempt.
Local elected officials deserve respect, because they represent an essential element of democratic legitimacy. But they do not represent, on their own, all democratic legitimacy, especially when fundamental local issues are at stake. Thus making them paragons of democratic virtue does not correspond to any reasonable reading of reality.
It therefore seems to me that this law does not correspond to constitutional standards in terms of freedom of expression: the objectives provided for by the law are confused, although apparently logical, but the means it sets out are too broad and its deleterious effects far outweigh its merits.