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
By The Canadian Press
Apr 21, 2026 | 12:38 PM
MONTRÉAL — 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.
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.