Quebec Justice Anne Paquette complicit in underming access to justice and disregarding human rights
MONTREAL -- On the morning of Thursday, September 10, 2026, Chief Justice Marie-Anne Paquette stood before an audience of judges, attorneys, and legal dignitaries at the traditional rentrée judiciaire de Montréal. With public indignation, she used her platform to sound an alarm regarding the systemic collapse of access to justice within the province of Quebec. In her address, Chief Justice Paquette stated that the legal system has become increasingly inaccessible to everyday citizens, pointing out a staggering statistic: nearly one in three individuals appearing before the Superior Court in civil or family matters must proceed entirely without legal counsel. She characterised this surge in self-represented litigants not as an administrative preference, but as a severe "symptom of a system that remains too difficult to access for more and more people." For those caught in the web of the provincial judiciary, her remarks were accurate in their diagnosis but utterly hypocritical in their execution.
While Chief Justice Paquette publicly laments the exclusion of ordinary citizens from the halls of justice, the court she commands actively fosters, enforces, and perpetuates an operational climate hostile to self-represented individuals. The lofty rhetoric delivered in the ceremonial courtrooms of Montreal stands in direct contradiction to the grim procedural warfare deployed against vulnerable litigants in regions like Gatineau. A profound example of this systemic failure is found in the case of Carby-Samuels v. Ville de Gatineau. This case serves as a definitive case study of how the Quebec Superior Court weaponises administrative rules, language barriers, and vexatious litigant designations to systematically silence marginalised self-represented litigants. When measured against the court's actual record, Chief Justice Paquette’s public expressions of concern reveal themselves to be nothing more than crocodile tears designed to shift blame onto the broader legal community while shielding her own bench from accountability.
I. The Subversion of Language Rights and Natural Justice
The concept of natural justice requires that a litigant have a meaningful opportunity to be heard and to understand the case against them. In a bilingual federation like Canada, language access is not an administrative luxury; it is a fundamental pillar of procedural fairness. In the landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision R. v. Tran, [1994] 2 S.C.R. 951, the country’s highest court established clear guidelines regarding the right to an interpreter. The Supreme Court ruled that under Section 14 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a party who does not understand or speak the language in which the proceedings are conducted has the right to the assistance of an interpreter. The court emphasised that interpretation services must be continuous, contemporaneous, and competent, recognising that a person cannot truly participate in their own defence if they are barred by language.
While official language minorities outside the province of Quebec routinely receive state-supported court interpreter services in civil and administrative proceedings, a different standard applies within Quebec's borders under Chief Justice Paquette’s administration. The Superior Court of Quebec has consistently failed to enforce or provide state-supported interpretation infrastructures for non-francophone litigants involved in complex civil disputes. This lack of institutional support forces English-speaking or allophone litigants to carry the immense financial burden of hiring private court interpreters simply to comprehend the verbal arguments made against them.
In Carby-Samuels v. Ville de Gatineau, this linguistic exclusion was weaponised by institutional actors. The legal team representing the Ville de Gatineau was permitted to submit extensive, highly technical legal materials written exclusively in French. Furthermore, institutional counsel made all verbal representations before the court in French, knowing that the self-represented plaintiff was an English speaker who lacked the resources to secure private, continuous interpretation. Instead of intervening to ensure structural fairness—as required by the spirit of R. v. Tran—the Quebec Superior Court allowed this imbalance to persist. By permitting an institutional entity to conduct a legal offensive in a language the opposing self-represented party could not fluently navigate, the court effectively subverted the rules of natural justice, transforming the courtroom into an exclusionary environment where language functions as a barrier to equity.
II. Draconian Procedural Rules as an Institutional Weapon
The inequality of arms in Quebec courtrooms is further exacerbated by the rigid, asymmetric application of procedural guidelines. In 2006, the Canadian Judicial Council issued its definitive Statement of Principles on Self-Represented Litigants and Accused Persons. This document, widely endorsed across Canadian jurisdictions, explicitly outlines the duties of the judiciary when dealing with unrepresented individuals. The Statement of Principles mandates that judges must ensure self-represented litigants are not unfairly penalised due to their lack of formal legal training. It emphasises that while unrepresented parties must comply with substantive law, they should not be disqualified, dismissed, or structurally disadvantaged based on minor, non-jurisdictional procedural technicalities. The document explicitly calls on judges to manage trials and hearings with sufficient flexibility to ensure that the core merits of a case are heard, rather than allowing cases to be decided by procedural traps.
The reality within the Quebec Superior Court under Chief Justice Paquette’s tenure stands in direct opposition to these national principles. In the Carby-Samuels matter, the court demonstrated a rigid adherence to procedural technicalities that effectively stripped the self-represented litigant of their right to respond. While the institutional attorneys for the Ville de Gatineau were granted the freedom to submit lengthy, exhaustive, and multi-page legal representations detailing their positions, the court subjected Carby-Samuels to a draconian one-page restriction for his written response.
When the self-represented litigant found it impossible to distill a complex constitutional and human rights argument into a single page—and consequently exceeded the limit—Justice Piché disqualified the response entirely. By striking the unrepresented party’s defence from the record on a minor formatting technicality, the court violated the Canadian Judicial Council’s core directives. The court prioritised rigid adherence to administrative convenience over the pursuit of substantive truth. This uneven application of rules creates an environment where corporate and municipal lawyers can use voluminous filings to overwhelm an unrepresented opponent, secure in the knowledge that the court will strictly penalise any procedural misstep made by the self-represented party.
III. The Weaponisation of Vexatious Litigant Orders and the Suppression of Race-Based Critiques
The most severe blow to access to justice within this framework is the court's use of the "vexatious litigant" designation. Under Canadian law, declaring a citizen a vexatious litigant is a remedy reserved for the most extreme cases of systemic court abuse. It is an extraordinary measure that strips a citizen of their fundamental right to access the court system without first obtaining written permission from a chief justice. This mechanism was designed to protect public resources from bad-faith, repetitive, and completely meritless legal actions. However, when an institutional litigant possesses infinite resources and the unrepresented party is struggling to navigate complex procedural hurdles, the vexatious designation can be weaponised to silence institutional critics and permanently suppress inconvenient litigation.
In the Carby-Samuels case, rather than accommodating a vulnerable litigant who was struggling against language barriers and highly restrictive formatting rules, the court facilitated the strategy of the Ville de Gatineau’s legal team. Justice Piché issued an order declaring Carby-Samuels a vexatious litigant, effectively shutting the doors of the courthouse to him. This ruling is particularly troubling when viewed through the lens of systemic discrimination. Carby-Samuels was a Black human rights complainant who had explicitly sought to invoke Canada’s Black Justice Strategy—a federal initiative designed to address the systemic overrepresentation, exclusion, and discriminatory treatment of Black Canadians within the judicial and legal systems.
By responding to a race-based human rights critique with an outright ban on further filings, the Quebec Superior Court demonstrated the exact systemic biases that Canada's Black Justice Strategy seeks to dismantle. Instead of engaging with the serious allegations of institutional discrimination and procedural exclusion raised by the plaintiff, the court used its authority to pathologise the litigant’s persistence as "vexatious." This pattern reveals a dark underbelly to Chief Justice Paquette's public complaints. The court laments the lack of access to justice in press conferences, but inside the courtroom, it uses its ultimate administrative power to permanently ban marginalised citizens who dare to highlight the racial and linguistic exclusions embedded within the Quebec legal apparatus.
IV. Conclusion: A Call for Genuine Institutional Accountability
The crisis facing self-represented litigants in Quebec will not be resolved by ceremonial speeches or public declarations of sympathy from the leadership of the bench. Chief Justice Marie-Anne Paquette cannot credibly critique the legal community for an access-to-justice crisis while she presides over a court culture that tolerates the systematic exclusion of language minorities, enforces asymmetric procedural rules, and relies on vexatious designations to silence civil rights complainants.
True access to justice requires structural accountability. It demands that the Quebec Superior Court align its internal operations with the Supreme Court’s mandate in R. v. Tran by providing state-supported interpretation services in civil proceedings involving language minorities. It requires strict adherence to the Canadian Judicial Council's Statement of Principles, ensuring that formatting limits and procedural technicalities are never used to disqualify the substantive rights of unrepresented individuals. Finally, it requires an immediate cessation of the weaponised use of vexatious litigant orders against marginalised communities and human rights advocates who point out systemic flaws. Until Chief Justice Paquette addresses the systemic barriers within her own jurisdiction, her public statements regarding a "broken system" reported in Le Journal de Montréal will remain empty rhetoric—crocodile tears shed for a crisis her own institution continues to perpetuate.
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