Between 1994 and 2004, 72% of cases involving homeless individuals in Montreal resulted in incarceration for non-payment of fines. Following community mobilization and the presentation of compelling academic studies, the Montreal Municipal Court implemented a moratorium in 2004 to stop issuing these arrest warrants. This moratorium led to the creation of numerous social programs, including the Court-Based Justice and Homelessness Support Program (PAJIC) established by the organization Droits Devant.
“They saw the need to create an organization to help people resolve their legal issues. There is the Droits Devant Clinic, which was founded in 2006. All the citations they might receive when a person occupies public space include, for example, loitering while intoxicated, making audible noise, urinating, failing to cross at intersections, or consuming alcoholic beverages in public. For these people, the park is their living room, the street is their dining room—they have no choice. They occupy public spaces, so they’re going to get a whole bunch of citations. They can rack up hundreds of dollars in fines in a single instance, a single stop. They get a citation for throwing trash on the ground. They put their cigarette ash on the ground—there’s a citation for that, for putting ash on the ground. And then there’s everything related to the subway when it comes to public transportation. They can’t afford it. So they often skip the subway. But every time the municipal court takes a step to try to collect the fine—whether it’s a letter, a default judgment, or a summons from a bailiff—all those steps involve court fees; the total fine just keeps going up.
What happens is that you want to get back on your feet, you want to build a new life, you want to move into an apartment, but they say, “I’ll never get out of this. I owe the City of Montreal 10, 15, 20, 30 thousand dollars. I’ll never be able to pay that back. If I want to own property, they can come and seize it. If I have a job, they’ll garnish my wages. They can’t see a way out. It’s a barrier to their reintegration because they’re constantly under the threat that a bailiff will come to their home to seize their property or that their wages will be garnished if they find a job. So, it’s a constant mental burden and a threat to them. Following the pressure and the mission that Clinique Droits Devant had set for itself, that’s when the commission looked into it.”
Following the commission’s formal recognition of social profiling in 2009, the Human Rights Tribunal provided a legal definition of the term in January 2025 in the Levasseur v. Montreal decision. This was the first legal definition of social profiling and was inspired by the Bombardier decision.
“Social profiling, at its core, is a form of abuse by those in positions of authority—whether here in Montreal it’s the Montreal Police Service (SPVM), law enforcement officers of any kind, such as those in the metro, or private security guards—toward a group of people who are often stigmatized because of their poverty. These aren’t official measures, but they are measures often taken by the SPVM. Before major events that attract large numbers of tourists to Montreal—we’re talking about events like the Grand Prix, the Jazz Festival, and the Comedy Festival—there’s talk that homelessness is visible in Montreal and that it’s disruptive. So at that point, there may be a surge in the issuance of citations to get people to move from the areas where these events are taking place or where tourists can relax without being disturbed by the visible poverty of certain citizens of the city of Montreal who are not considered fully fledged citizens. We seem to be quite comfortable with these kinds of cleanup operations in public spaces. There’s also the enforcement of municipal regulations. Basically, making noise that can be heard outside is often a regulation—let’s say—that applies to a bar or a concert hall where they’re going to be making a lot of noise outside without a permit, or where it’s going to disturb the neighbors, people trying to sleep, things like that. But here, they’re applying it in a context where it’s a person shouting or a person hanging around—say, if they’re dragging their personal belongings in a suitcase and the suitcase makes a loud noise because a wheel is broken or something like that. Well, they’re going to target an individual instead of an institution, even though the bylaw was created for something else. It’s vague. They’re using this vagueness against people who sleep in the same parks, who panhandle on the same street corners, who drink beer with the same crowd. The police have realized they know these people, so they’re using municipal bylaw enforcement to harass them and get them to leave.”
“The studies conducted by Céline Bellot provide ample evidence of profiling. She is a researcher at the University of Montreal who worked with the Observatory on Social Profiling. Analyses have shown that people experiencing homelessness—who make up a very small fraction of Montreal’s population—receive the highest percentage of citations. So, this is fairly clear statistical evidence. These citations are not issued to the average person. There are people who are more visible on the streets; homelessness is more visible, and it is they who receive the majority of citations for violations of the City of Montreal’s by-laws.”
Even though homeless people are no longer jailed for non-payment of fines, the over-criminalization through traffic citations has not stopped. In the face of this major problem, the PAJIC program offers a solution to combat this social profiling. “The PAJIC program stands for ‘Justice Support for the Homeless in Court.’ It was developed in collaboration with the Montreal Municipal Court, and the program aims to have traffic tickets issued during a period of homelessness dismissed. We at the Clinique Droits Devant serve as the entry point for PAJIC. So, people come to see us, we conduct an assessment, and if it’s positive, an appointment is scheduled with a Crown prosecutor at our offices as well. People really appreciate this because going to court is very stressful. The Crown prosecutor will ask the same questions: what was going on in their lives at the time, and how are they doing today? Then they’ll offer a settlement for their citations, which we always hope will involve the withdrawal of all the citations they received during their period of homelessness, so they no longer have the burden of that debt.”
