Student group liable in strike suit
The student association of St-Laurent CEGEP has been ordered to pay $6,305 in damages to a student who argued he had been deprived of his classes — and diploma — by the student strikes of 2012.
Antoine Michaudville had been studying water filtration management at the CEGEP in 2012. When students across the province went on strike that year to protest a proposed hike in tuition fees, his courses ended only in October rather than their scheduled date in May of that year.
Arguing he had intended to begin his professional career in the summer of 2012 but was unable to because he had yet to receive his diploma, Michaudville sought $15,000 in damages from the CEGEP and its student association.
And a Small Claims Court judge agreed with him in part, awarding him $6,305 in damages plus interest.
Michaudville had argued that the CEGEP had not given the courses he had registered for and the student association had not allowed those courses to be taught. He had even obtained an injunction ordering that the courses be offered.
However the judge found the CEGEP had done all it could to offer the courses without compromising the safety of its students and was not at fault. But the court dismissed the student association’s argument that the strike was part of the right of freedom of expression and that it had not incited its membership to acts of violence nor condoned those acts.
“It was the association that kept the CEGEP from providing courses to Michaudville. As a part of the “strike” movement or “boycott” it was also (the association) that called upon its members to join the movement and demonstrate. (The association) cannot exercise its freedom of expression to the detriment of Michaudville to receive the courses for which he had registered. In behaving as it did (the association) ... must assume the damages then caused to Michaudville.”
But despite Michaudville’s victory, a law professor thinks it’s unlikely there will be a flood of damage claims from students who also saw their educations put on hold by the strike.
Finn Makela of the Université de Sherbrooke says the legal window for any similar claim for damages is extremely narrow. First, any action would have had to have been filed within three years of the alleged claim’s having occurred. However, some claims filed within that deadline have yet to be settled.
“But I doubt extremely that there will be an avalanche of lawsuits,” he said. “Neither for 2012 nor the (protest) movement of 2015.”
Makela also doubts the Michaudville ruling will establish any legal precedent, having been rendered by a lower court and containing no legal references to the existence of the students’ “right to strike” as examined by rulings by the Quebec Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.