Quebec has collected only about a third of the fines handed out during the pandemic

More than two years after Quebec lifted most COVID-era public health measures, the province has recouped just over a third of the $68 million it levied in fines over the pandemic.

Quebec has had some of the strictest public health measures in the country during the pandemic, and was the only province to impose a curfew on its residents. Since the start of COVID-19 in 2020, authorities have issued nearly 44,000 fines for violations of the provincial Public Health Act, including illegal gatherings, not wearing a mask and violating the curfew.

The vast majority of those tickets were distributed before the end of 2022, as most COVID restrictions were lifted in the spring of that year.

Two years later, however, the government is still trying to get people to pay for those fines. As of June 30, the government had collected $25.2 million — about 37 percent of the total. The average amount owed per fine is about $1,500.

Cathy Chenard, a spokesperson for Quebec’s Justice Department, says only 17 percent of offenders pleaded guilty or paid their fines without entering a plea. Another 41 percent simply ignored the fines and face an order to pay in absentia. And 42 percent pleaded not guilty, with some of those cases still working their way through the legal system.

Caroline Veillette-Jackson, a legal aid lawyer in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, believes that many people who were fined wanted to appeal because they questioned the legality of the public health measures.

“The scale of the protest is probably related to the fact that it was a special, temporary law that severely restricted people’s freedom,” she said.

The government does not expect to collect the full $67.7 million it has handed out in fines. Some tickets may be dropped and some offenders may be acquitted, Chenard said in an email, while other cases have not yet been decided.

Fighting the odds

Still, the chances of someone deciding to fight their ticket are slim. Chenard said the conviction rate for cases tried in Quebec court is about 95 percent.

Despite this, many people have chosen to fight and even appeal their convictions, meaning that certain cases can drag on for years.

One of Veillette-Jackson’s clients, Sandra Plante, was among the few acquitted earlier this year. Plante was fined in April 2021 for organizing an illegal gathering of six adults.

She did not deny breaking the rules, but a judge ruled in her favor, arguing that the police had violated her rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by entering her property without reasonable suspicion that an offense had been committed.

Although Plante was acquitted, the judge still criticized her decision to organize a party in the middle of the pandemic.

“This behavior is purely selfish and clearly morally reprehensible,” he wrote in a February decision.

Veillette-Jackson said the case proved an important point, even though her client had broken the rules.

“Just because there were health measures, that didn’t provide a solution. [police] “More power to enter people’s homes,” she said.

But that case was unusual. Dylan Jones, a Montreal criminal defense lawyer, said many people who get fined don’t want to hire lawyers and incur extra costs. Instead, they represent themselves in court — generally without success.

He and Veillette-Jackson both believe the wave of COVID-19-related fines has peaked.

“Now it’s a matter of recovering the fines or wrapping up the final cases,” Jones said.

Neither the Ministry of Justice nor the Quebec Public Prosecutor’s Office have provided information on the number of cases of people still challenging fines related to the pandemic.

Quebec adopted a punitive approach to enforcing public health measures early in the pandemic. A report by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association found that by June 2020, Quebec had issued 77 percent of the fines issued across Canada to date.

Last February, a Quebec court judge upheld the province’s pandemic-era curfews, arguably the most controversial of the government’s public health measures. Judge Marie-France Beaulieu ruled that the curfews, imposed twice in 2021 and 2022, did violate Charter rights, but that those violations were justified in the public health context.

That decision is being appealed. Olivier Séguin, a lawyer for the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms who is representing the defendant in the case, said public health officials have acknowledged that part of the purpose of the curfew was to send a message about the importance of following the rules.

This objective exceeds the limits of the provincial public health law, Séguin argues.

“It might be permissible to impose a curfew under the Public Health Act to prevent community transmission of the virus,” he said. “But if the purpose of the curfew was to exercise discipline over the population, then the Public Health Act did not authorize that.”

If the Quebec Superior Court overturns the lower court’s ruling, the government will have to refund all fines people paid for violating the curfew, Séguin said.

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