Ex-Concordia prof who murdered colleagues denied parole, denied new prison lawsuit over soup

Valery Fabrikant at court in 1992. (CTV)

Montreal — Valery Fabrikant, the former Concordia University professor who killed four colleagues in 1992, was denied parole in a Wednesday decision.

Fabrikant, now 80, also got word this week that his most recent jailhouse lawsuit – over kosher prison food and specifically kosher soup – appears to be going nowhere.

Since 1992, when he killed four colleagues at Concordia, Fabrikant hasn’t admitted that he preyed on innocent people, the Parole Board of Canada wrote in a 10-page decision.

At the time of the murders, he faced dismissal as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia.

On an August day he opened fire in the engineering department, killing four professors and injuring a secretary.

The Parole Board wrote that Fabrikant still doesn’t see himself as a risk to society, but that the team handling his case disagrees. The board ruled that his release would pose a risk to society.

In 2016, he was also denied day parole passes.

Over his 28 years behind bars, Fabrikant has been declared a “vexatious litigant” at several levels of court: the Quebec Superior Court, the Federal Court and, most recently, the Federal Court of Appeal, as of last year.

Since then, he has tried his hand in a new forum, trying to proceed with a lawsuit in Ontario Superior Court over the quality of the kosher food at Archambault Prison, the Montreal-area institution where he’s lived since 2011.

In his statement of claim against Correctional Service Canada, Fabrikant wrote that he keeps kosher in prison and stopped getting served soup.

Until December 2017, he “was served Kosher soup every day. He stopped getting Kosher soup at that time, while other inmates continue to get soup regularly,” according to a ruling released Monday.

He also complained that in August of 2019, the prison system changed its Kosher food supplier, and the new food is “either unappetizing to the point of being inedible, or the portions are much smaller than the non-Kosher dishes served to non-Jewish inmates” and less than Canadian prisons’ portion guidelines.

Fabrikant represented himself in court.

The correctional service sought to strike his statement of claim, partly on the grounds that the Ontario Superior Court had no grounds to hear it, since Fabrikant’s prison is in Quebec.

CSC argued the attempted lawsuit was an abuse of process solely meant to work around the fact that Fabrikant, as a “vexatious litigant,” had been barred from doing the same in Quebec or Federal Court without permission.

Fabrikant argued that the Ontario court was the right place for his claim “because decisions about the choice of food suppliers for federal prisons are made at a national level at CSC headquarters in Ottawa.”

The judge in the case, Justice Sally Gomery, sided with the Correctional Service and struck Fabrikant’s statement of claim, meaning she ruled it’s not worth proceeding with as written—though she allowed Fabrikant a chance to amend the claim to clarify why he thinks it belongs in an Ontario court.

--With files from The Canadian Press