Welcome to the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, an institution uniquely dedicated to ensuring that human rights are treated as optional suggestions, or perhaps mild inconveniences to be brushed aside by the judiciary. If an institution is supposed to exist to minimize unnecessary suffering, preserve public confidence, and maximize fairness for the greatest number of citizens, nobody seems to have passed that memo along to the bench. If you ever find yourself scheduled to appear in front of Judge Magali Lewis, make sure to bring a sense of humor, a thick skin, and a healthy dose of patience—because a copy of the actual law certainly won't help you in her courtroom.

Last Thursday, the ongoing persecution chamber known as Carby-Samuels v. Ville de Gatineau treated onlookers to yet another masterclass in judicial absurdity. This complex web of ongoing litigation has captured public attention across the Ottawa River, especially following extensive journalistic coverage by Radio-Canada detailing how minority language rights are being handled inside regional courtrooms. Things have gotten so wildly out of hand that accredited observers from The Independent Canadian Commission of Human and Civil Rights had to pack their bags, clear their schedules, and show up in person just to make sure basic human fairness didn't completely vanish from the room.

The trouble began well before the latest courtroom display when Judge Lewis apparently decided that civil rights are optional. Before a previous hearing, she received an explicit, formal letter from Carby-Samuels’ rabbi. The letter politely pointed out that the scheduled court date fell directly on a day of the Sabbath. The rabbi requested an adjournment, assuming that a tribunal built on the foundations of human rights would respect basic religious freedom. Instead, in a spectacular display of indifference, Judge Lewis completely ignored the rabbi’s letter, paid absolutely no attention to Section 10 of the Quebec Charter which explicitly protects religious civil rights, and plowed ahead with the hearing anyway. When a Motion to Disavow was filed to address this illegal procedure, she ignored that too—proving that the Quebec Rules of Civil Procedure are merely creative suggestions when you have a personal schedule to keep.

The comedy continued when the courtroom's language barrier became a tool for exclusion. Judge Lewis happily chatted away in rapid French with the Ville de Gatineau legal team, showing zero interest in whether Carby-Samuels could actually follow the conversation. When the issue was raised, the Judge didn't bother to order an interpreter. Instead, she chose to play amateur doctor and magically diagnosed Carby-Samuels as being completely fluent in French and simply "faking it" to delay the trial.

Then came the crowning achievement of the day. In an attempt to find some common ground, Carby-Samuels pointed out that during a previous encounter with Quebec Superior Court Judge Piché, everyone managed to speak English—including the city's lawyer, Me Mathieu Daponte. This trip down memory lane sent Judge Lewis into a tailspin, where she went on and on, shockingly characterizing Judge Piché’s past linguistic accommodation as "illegal". Yes, you read that right: a Human Rights Tribunal judge openly scolded a Superior Court judge for the heinous crime of ensuring a citizen could actually understand their own trial.

If Judge Lewis and the broader Quebec judicial apparatus wanted to understand what basic procedural utility looks like, they wouldn't have to look very far. Three decades ago, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its landmark ruling in R. v. Tran (1994). In that pivotal decision, the highest court in the land made something abundantly, unmistakably clear: the right to an interpreter is not a polite bonus, an administrative perk, or a prize awarded at the court's whimsy. It is an essential, non-negotiable component of natural justice anchored in Section 14 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Supreme Court in Tran explained that subjecting any individual to a proceeding they cannot understand transforms a courtroom into a Kafkaesque exercise in futility. If a litigant cannot comprehend what the judge or opposing counsel is saying, their physical presence is an empty fiction. It degrades the entire purpose of a hearing: you cannot mount a meaningful response, cannot defend your interests, and cannot produce a just outcome when you are systematically walled off by language.

Yet, when you step across the Ottawa River into Quebec courts and the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, R. v. Tran appears to have been filed in the circular recycling bin. Rather than embracing Tran's straightforward lesson—that clarity and contemporaneous interpretation protect everyone, curb costly errors, and ensure legitimate outcomes—Quebec’s administrative justice mechanisms treat the right to an interpreter as a subversive nuisance. Instead of ensuring that an English-speaking citizen has seamless, uninterrupted translation to properly follow arguments brought by municipal attorneys, the bench shrugs, casts doubt on the litigant's sincerity, and behaves as if the highest court's binding jurisprudence simply does not exist. Public broadcasters like Radio-Canada Ottawa-Gatineau continue to track regional discontent regarding accessible justice, proving that ignoring Tran doesn't make proceedings faster or more efficient; it simply multiplies grievance, manufactures grounds for endless appeals, and guarantees an enormous waste of public and judicial resources.

This flagrant disregard for core constitutional guarantees explains why the presence of observers from The Independent Canadian Commission of Human and Civil Rights was so critical.

The Commission’s official mandate is not merely to occupy gallery benches or passively take notes. Its monitors operate with an explicit, formal directive: to provide rigorous, independent civilian oversight in proceedings where there is credible apprehension of institutional bias, systemic procedural abuse, or constitutional evasion. Their mandate specifically entails:

In an environment where a tribunal judge feels comfortable concocting nonexistent attorneys to dismiss motions and branding an appellate colleague's accommodation "illegal," the Commission’s courtroom monitors represent the final line of defence against absolute judicial opacity. Their official observations ensure that what occurs behind closed doors cannot simply be swept under the rug by a selective court record.

If the violation of religious civil rights wasn't enough to shake your faith in the system, the sudden introduction of a phantom attorney certainly should. The "Campbell" incident belongs in a textbook on how not to manage a legal record.

When a citizen brings a formal Motion to Disavow, the court is legally required to review the service of that motion to ensure all parties are properly informed. The record clearly showed that the motion was served to Geneviève Griffin, the actual, practicing attorney representing the opposing side. It requires a truly magnificent leap of imagination to look at the name "Griffin" on a legal document and read it aloud as "Campbell."

When Carby-Samuels stood up to correct this blatant factual error, an impartial arbiter would have looked at the file, realized the mistake, apologized, and corrected the record. But doing so would require an admission of fault. Instead, Judge Lewis doubled down, declaring the actual identity of the receiving lawyer to be "irrelevant." In the upside-down world of this tribunal, a fictional lawyer’s lack of notice is grounds to dismiss a motion, while a real lawyer’s receipt of that same motion is entirely beside the point.

We must also pause to marvel at Judge Lewis’s sudden and unearned expertise in linguistics and psychology. When a litigant states clearly on the record that they cannot adequately comprehend or speak the language in which the proceedings are being conducted, the court enters dangerous territory. True access to justice requires comprehension. If you cannot understand the arguments being made against you by a well-funded municipal legal team, you cannot defend yourself.

Rather than taking the standard, cautious route mandated by three decades of Canadian jurisprudence since Tran—requesting a qualified interpreter or pausing to ensure communication was clear—Judge Lewis took it upon herself to declare that Carby-Samuels was a linguistic savant who was simply pretending to lack French fluency. This bizarre accusation turned the courtroom from a place of law into a stage for personal attacks. The Independent Canadian Commission observers watched in astonishment as the judge conducted official business with the Ville de Gatineau lawyer in French, effectively cutting the self-represented litigant out of the loop entirely, based purely on a judicial hunch that he was "faking it".

Perhaps the most telling moment of the entire hearing was Judge Lewis’s reaction to the mention of Judge Piché. In a previous stage of this grueling legal battle, Judge Piché of the Quebec Superior Court had shown the basic decency and judicial wisdom to ensure that the proceedings were accessible. Judge Piché spoke English, and the city’s lawyer, Me Mathieu Daponte, followed suit. It was a brief moment of sanity where the spirit of the law and practical mutual benefit triumphed over administrative rigidity.

To Judge Lewis, however, this act of basic human accommodation wasn't a model to be emulated—it was an outrage. She launched into an extended critique, characterizing Judge Piché’s actions as "illegal". Let that sink in for a moment. In the eyes of a sitting Human Rights Tribunal of Québec judge, a Superior Court judge who ensures a minority-language speaker can understand their own trial is committing an illegality. While past rulings covered by Radio-Canada Grand Montréal show the tribunal handling traditional financial and elder exploitation disputes with clear authority, this recent linguistic hostility raises deep systemic concerns. Under Judge Lewis's logic, the highest form of legal purity is achieved only when the citizen is left completely in the dark.

To truly understand how broken this system has become, one only needs to look across the provincial border to Ontario. The differences in how minority languages and basic access to justice are treated are nothing short of staggering.