In early 2019, not long after Joseph-Christopher Luamba got his driver’s licence, the young Black man was randomly stopped by Montreal police while driving to school. They checked his ID and let him go.
Eight months later, the same thing happened: randomly stopped, ID and vehicle documents checked, sent on his way.
Six months later, the same thing happened: Police in Gatineau randomly stopped Mr. Luamba. The officer, according to court records, told him it was a traffic stop for verification purposes. They asked him to explain why he was in Gatineau. After several questions and a check of documents, he was allowed to drive on.
Mr. Luamba, shaken by the experiences, believed such random traffic stops – endorsed a quarter-century ago by the Supreme Court of Canada – were not random at all.
He took the Quebec government to court and won in 2022. Quebec’s law that enabled police to arbitrarily detain drivers on the road with no suspicious grounds, similar to other laws across the country, was struck down because it was found to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ guarantee against arbitrary detention and also Charter equality rights.
The victory was upheld in 2024 at the province’s Court of Appeal.
Now, in a two-day hearing starting Monday, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear this landmark equality and police powers case – and revisit a long-ago precedent.
Quebec and several provinces, alongside lawyers for the federal government, will try to convince judges of the Supreme Court to overturn the rulings of the lower courts and reaffirm precedent.
Governments insist it is a matter of essential road safety.
Mr. Luamba and an array of groups want the top court to strike down precedent and recognize that giving police such powers enables racism. They are calling on the Supreme Court to ban police from random stops of drivers throughout Canada.
“There isn’t anything random about these suspicion-less stops,” said Harini Sivalingam, director of the equality program of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which, with Mr. Luamba and the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers, is a respondent at the Supreme Court.
“We’re not saying all police officers are biased,” said Ms. Sivalingam. “But there’s a systemic bias – and it’s well-documented.”
In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled – in a 5-4 decision – that cops were allowed to randomly stop drivers, declaring “statistics relating to the carnage on the highways substantiate a pressing and substantial concern.”
The case involved Gerald Jay Ladouceur, who had been randomly stopped while driving one evening in Ottawa. Police said they wanted to check his documents. They discovered he had a suspended licence. He was charged, convicted and fined $2,000. Thereafter he launched a Charter challenge.
The top court said the random stop violated the Charter prohibition against arbitrary detention but that it was, after weighing it against Section 1 of the Charter, a reasonable limit on individual freedoms.
This view garnered considerable legal skepticism. The dissent included then-chief justice Brian Dickson. The minority of four judges believed such police powers to detain citizens on the road for no reason went too far. “The decision may be based on any whim,” the dissenting judges argued.
The first trial in Mr. Luamba’s case at the Superior Court of Quebec took 21 days. In Justice Michel Yergeau’s 2022 ruling, he wrote of Mr. Luamba’s experiences: “The expression ‘driving while Black’ aptly reflects this reality.”
“Racial profiling does exist,” Justice Yergeau went on to write. “It is a reality that weighs heavily on Black communities.”
Mr. Luamba, in a social-media post after the victory, spoke of how racial profiling stigmatizes and discriminates. “The fight is not over,” he wrote. Ahead of the Supreme Court case, neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.
(The validity of random police stops at fixed checkpoints, such as those used to deter drunk driving, has not been challenged in this case. The Supreme Court in the 1980s twice upheld the legality of random stops at fixed locations.)
For general random stops on the road, Quebec and other governments in legal filings acknowledged the problem of racial profiling.
Quebec said racial profiling violated the constitutional rights of Black people. The federal government condemned it; Ontario said it did not deny it; British Columbia called it a scourge that should not be tolerated.
But all defended the law, as did the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police: The court shouldn’t equate an officer’s misuse of authority with the purpose – road safety – of the law.
“Illegal acts are not the result of the law,” Quebec argued. Ottawa said upholding the law preserves road safety: “Driving a motor vehicle is a privilege, given the dangers involved.” Ontario warned against dismantling a legal doctrine that contributes to a “critical public safety function.”
Yet in the lower courts, experts testifying on behalf of the Quebec government could not offer data or studies that showed random stops made the roads safer.
Meanwhile, the Quebec Court of Appeal judgment noted ample evidence that arbitrary stops sometimes lead to racial profiling. Academic research in Quebec in 2019 found that young Black men such as Mr. Luamba are more than five times likelier to be stopped by a cop than their white peers.
The case has attracted widespread attention. More than a dozen groups will present short arguments as interveners.
The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund is focusing on equality rights in Section 15 of the Charter, where it states that every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection without discrimination.
Akosua Matthews, counsel for the group, said this may be the first time in the Charter’s history that the Supreme Court rules on questions of racism against Black people and Section 15.
“This is a rare opportunity to directly confront this issue,” she said in an interview.
The Criminal Lawyers’ Association of Ontario in its court filing argued that in random police stops there is little-to-no oversight of the exercise of power – “in ways that fall heaviest on racialized communities,” the group said.
“This power,” the lawyers’ group said, “is constitutionally untenable.”