Soninder Dhingra is one of the biggest drug traffickers in Quebec. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2018.
But because the judge at her trial did not respect her right to a trial in English, the Quebec Court of Appeal on Thursday ordered a new trial.
Dhingra, incarcerated since 2014, has already served almost half of that 15-year sentence, and he remains in detention.
If this case is interesting, it is not only because it shows the low level of interpreter and forensic translation services, even in Montreal.
It is also because it comes at a time that could not be more politically hot.
For the past year, the Minister of Justice and Minister responsible for the French Language, Simon Jolin-Barrette, has decided to lead a sort of small fight against the Court of Quebec.
Traditionally, when a judge’s post is open, the court itself establishes the application requirements, according to the needs of the post and the region: you need a civil lawyer, or a criminal lawyer, or a youth judge, or a generalist. And if the position is in the Montreal area, the court will generally require bilingualism as a criterion.
It was no problem. It is the court that knows its needs.
But Minister Jolin-Barrette decided that this requirement for bilingualism was a sort of blight on the French language. As if the competence of bilingualism threatened French.
He therefore ruled that the court should justify the need for bilingualism for each open judge position. For example: in Longueuil, why would there be a need for a bilingual judge in the criminal division? Refuse.
We are still talking about “irremovable” people earning a salary of nearly $ 300,000. Is it exorbitant to ask them to speak English in the greater Montreal area?
Seems so for the Minister.
Chief Justice Lucie Rondeau explained that this is not a whim, it is to respond to a constitutional right, that of being tried in the language of one’s choice in a criminal trial. And that if one fine morning a person appears in court and demands to be tried in English, they are entitled to it, just as we have the right to be tried in French in Moose Jaw.
Either way, replied the minister. Never mind: if the judge doesn’t speak English, all you have to do is call an interpreter.
Indeed, the thing seems to go without saying.
Except that it is not at all obvious. Anyone who knows the reality of courthouses at all, that is to say a lot of people, but not Mr. Jolin-Barrette, knows that courthouses are very poorly provided with interpreters, that they are poorly paid, or absent subscribers, and that the translation services are so poorly stocked that the delays risk to derail the files.
Whatever: Mr. Jolin-Barrette thinks that by reducing the requirements and skills of candidate judges, we are advancing the cause of French.
Ditto for prosecutors. Why hire bilingual prosecutors when we have interpreters on hand?
This is one more step that I criticize his Bill 96: it is not enough to strengthen Bill 101, to promote French, to demand it more and more, to make immigrants French; apparently we should be afraid of the bilingualism of professionals.
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I come back to this case, which the Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday in Montreal. It has nothing to do with it, in a way. The trial judge and the prosecutors were perfectly bilingual. The accused was granted recognition of his right to a trial in English, or to a translation – most of the witnesses being French-speaking.
The problem is that the court was so poorly equipped and the services so poorly done that we were reduced to whispering the translation of legal proceedings in his ear. The court had however promised that the interpretation would be recorded separately, which goes without saying: all the words are recorded in a trial in the event of appeal.
It should be understood that the fear of lengthening the debates prompts the judges not to retain the option of an interpreter who repeats for the recording what the witness has just said in the other language. With reason.
Either way, the trial didn’t really take place in English, and the interpretation is unverifiable, because it’s whispered or poorly recorded.
Conclusion? New trial.
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There is nothing surprising, new or unpredictable here. Since 1999, with the Beaulac affair, language rights in criminal matters in Canada have not been negotiable.
The irony is that 99% of cases concern francophones outside Quebec. Jean Victor Beaulac, who gave his name to this famous cause, was charged with murder in British Columbia. He unsuccessfully requested a trial in French and was sentenced. The Supreme Court overturned that conviction, even though it was his third trial for the same murder. The judgment, arguably the most memorable of Judge Michel Bastarache, was a thunderclap in the Canadian judicial world. This time, a large portion of judicial English Canada was crying out injustice and the exaggeration of the linguistic rights of the French-speaking minority!
Causes have arisen from Manitoba to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario. The message was clear: a francophone has the right to a judge and a prosecutor who speaks his language in a criminal trial, anywhere in Canada. Administrative or personnel problems, costs: all this does not affect this right. It is, so to speak, absolute and non-negotiable. Arrange yourself!
This is generally not a problem in Montreal, where it is generally easy to find bilingual staff.
Except that translation services have been neglected so much… that we are getting to this kind of result.
When we add to the equation the constraint of the Jordan judgment, which sets rigid deadlines for cases, the level of difficulty increases accordingly.
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That is, very simply, very concretely, and not at all politically, what Chief Justice Rondeau was thinking when the Court of Quebec filed a motion in the Superior Court last week against the minister.
What do the 41 pages of this wholesale query say? So mind your own business, let us manage our court, the official language of Quebec will not suffer, and there will be less risk of a legal accident.
This trafficker’s order for a new trial is sort of absurd proof.