City of Montreal in court trying to overturn landmark police racial profiling ruling

Lawyer Papa Mike Diomande is shown at the Montreal courthouse, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, representing Alexandre Lamontagne in a class action suit against the City of Montreal and Montreal police for racial profiling. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Pierre Saint-Arnaud)

Lawyers for the City of Montreal asked the Court of Appeal on Tuesday to overturn a landmark class-action ruling on racial profiling by police, saying it’s too complicated to determine how much each member is eligible to receive.

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The city is appealing a 2024 Superior Court ruling that determined Montreal police had a systemic racial profiling problem. Racialized citizens had alleged they were unfairly stopped, arrested, detained, and profiled by police between mid-August 2017 and January 2019.

Superior Court Justice Dominique Poulin held the city responsible for violating class-action members’ Charter rights, ordering the city to pay each of them up to $5,000 in damages.

On Tuesday, Raphaël Lescop, a lawyer representing the city, told a panel of Court of Appeal justices that Poulin should not have ordered damages to an unspecified number of victims, when the trial judge heard testimony from only one member of the class action: lead plaintiff Alexandre Lamontagne.

Lamontagne is a Black man who was stopped by Montreal police while leaving an Old Montreal bar in August 2017. During his arrest he was pinned to the ground, handcuffed and taken to the station. He was then issued three statements of offence and charged with obstructing police work and assaulting a police officer, but most proceedings against him were eventually dropped.

Lescop said the trial judge’s decision was based on insufficient proof because it relied on one witness and on statistics from the police department.

“Are we saying all racialized people who are stopped by police are victims of racial profiling that should be compensated?” Lescop asked the three Court of Appeal judges.

• READ MORE: Black Lives Ruined: What goes through a Black man’s mind when he’s pulled over

Justice Christian Immer pushed back, saying Poulin had imposed a ceiling on the amount that can be claimed in compensation. Immer also questioned whether Lescop was arguing that all those who could be eligible would have to come plead their cases individually, which he said goes against the spirit of the class action.

Lawyers for the Black Coalition of Quebec, which had brought the class action, said Lescop was implicitly asking for a retrial. They said Poulin’s judgment already covers the city’s concerns. Mike Diomande, one of the two lawyers representing the Coalition, urged the court to focus on whether Poulin made legal errors in her ruling.

Diomande said the Superior Court judge laid out clear criteria for people who could be eligible for compensation: individuals who were stopped, arrested or detained without justification and who had their personal information recorded by police.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on April 21, 2026.

Erika Morris, The Canadian Press