By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

All of the 17 provincial prisons in Quebec, including the Sherbrooke detention centre, were placed in lockdown for several hours on Dec. 3 as correctional officers staged a spontaneous protest in solidarity with an officer who suffered severe injuries after a beating by an inmate at the Sorel-Tracy detention centre. Detainees remained in their cells all morning and were unable to attend court appearances, go to medical appointments, have meals or take part in educational or recreational activities from 7 a.m. to noon.

Mathieu Lavoie, president of the Syndicat des agents de la paix en services correctionnels du Québec (SAPSCQ-CSN), the CSN-affiliated union representing prison guards, said the protest was also intended to draw attention to guards’ longstanding concerns. “We’ve seen a lot more violence and infiltration [of contraband] into prisons over the last few months,” he said. “There’s also a labour shortage – the Sorel-Tracy centre has 30 unfilled positions, and while those positions are empty, people are doing overtime.” The union has been negotiating with the Ministry of Public Safety (MSP) for a new collective agreement; the previous agreement expired in 2023.

Prison guards, like nurses, police officers and paramedics, are considered essential services and normally don’t have the legal right to strike. The MSP called union representatives to an emergency hearing before the Quebec Labour Arbitration Tribunal (Tribunal administratif du travail; TAT) on the day of the protest.

According to Judge Sylvain Allard’s ruling, released Dec. 9, union representatives said the protest had been planned by the union the night before, and acknowledged their actions constituted an illegal strike. Allard found that “the prison population and the population in general were deprived of services to which they were entitled” and “security at the prison was not assured” during the protest. Allard noted that the protest disrupted court proceedings, impacted the health of vulnerable detainees, delayed prison maintenance work and disrupted the schedules of teachers and delivery workers.

Allard ordered SASPQ-CSN members to return to work “in the usual way” and ordered the union to inform its members that further work stoppages wouldn’t be tolerated.

Provincial prisons house detainees serving sentences of less than two years; those serving longer sentences are sent to federal prisons. Correctional officers at the ten federal prisons in Quebec, including the medium-security Cowansville Institution, are represented by a separate union and didn’t take part in the protest.

As of this writing, neither the SASPQ-CSN nor the MSP had commented directly on the ruling.