Are We Really Minorities?

I — The word that isolates

« Minority » isn’t a number. It’s a function.

Section 10 of the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms of Quebec lists fourteen prohibited grounds of discrimination : race, colour, sex, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, sexual orientation, civil status, age, religion, political convictions, language, ethnic or national origin, social condition, handicap. Taken one by one, these grounds define « minorities ». Taken together, they cover most of the population.

And yet the word does constant rhetorical work. It suggests that the people it designates are the exception, the special case, the adjustment to be made at the margin of a system designed for someone else. It is precisely this presupposition — that the system is normal and the minority must adapt — that demographic reality contradicts. The « default » litigant — the one for whom the system is, in practice, still designed — is someone who can pay their lawyer, who reads their file in their first language, who understands legal vocabulary because they went through school, and who walks into the courtroom without physical or sensory barriers. This profile is broadly documented by access-to-justice research12 and by several Quebec public inquiry reports3. Everyone else — the immense rest — faces, at every step of the process, obstacles that this model-litigant doesn’t have to face : having to explain themselves, prove their good faith, negotiate their own presence, or be denied accommodations that should be self-evident. We have documented the refusal of reasonable accommodations in Quebec courthouses — a file we will return to.

II — Do the math

The arithmetic of the margins

The figures that follow come from Statistics Canada, the Institut de la statistique du Québec, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, and the Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services.

People living with a disability : 27 % of Canadians aged 15 and over, or 8 million people (CSD 2022). In Quebec, 21 %. The most marked increase concerns mental health.

Racialized people : 16.1 % of Quebec’s population in 2021 (1.3 million people), 26.5 % in Canada, with a projected 38 to 43 % by 2041.

Immigrants : 14.6 % in Quebec, 23 % in Canada in 2021.

2SLGBTQ+ community : more than 1.3 million Canadians aged 15 and over (~4.4 %). Police-reported hate crimes based on sexual orientation rose 69 % between 2022 and 2023.

People with alcohol or drug dependencies : these are ill people who need help, not moral failings to be punished. 21.6 % of Canadian adults (about 6 million) meet, at some point in their life, the criteria for a substance use disorder. Alcohol alone affects 18.1 % for abuse or dependence. Quebec has the highest alcohol consumption rate in the country.

People experiencing homelessness : approximately 10,000 people in visible homelessness in Quebec in 2022, +44 % since 2018. Sheltered homelessness rose another 15 % in 2024. Hidden homelessness is not counted.

Seniors : nearly 20 % of Quebec’s population. Among those 65 and over, the disability rate reaches 40 %.

Neurodivergent people : roughly one in five according to broad estimates (autism, ADHD, dyslexia, tic disorders).

To this add people without a diploma, people living below the low-income cut-off, women who are victims of intimate partner violence, single-parent families, and Indigenous people.

Add them up. Account for overlaps, without overestimating them : an autistic person can also be racialized, an immigrant, poor, and have experienced homelessness. What appears isn’t a mosaic of minorities. It’s the population.

III — The case that struck me

When a letter becomes a diagnosis

I am the founder and editor of EnDroit.ca, formerly Justice-Quebec.ca. I am also an autistic person, with Tourette syndrome and ADHD. I am also someone who has fought, all my life, against alcoholism and drug addiction — and who feels no shame about saying it, because the shame belongs to the system that turns illness into moral failure, not to those who are the first wounded by it. I am also a dad. I am also a human being.

In recent weeks, our newsroom has been looking into a file that was brought to its attention. A lawyer practising in Quebec sent to a person living with the same neurodevelopmental conditions as I do — autism and Tourette syndrome — a three-page demand letter in which she accumulated, against this person, deeply discriminatory psychologizing characterizations. These characterizations were directly contradicted, point by point, by the person’s formal neuropsychological report — a report signed by a member of the Order of Psychologists of Quebec, which the lawyer had in her possession at the time she wrote her letter.

The author of the letter went so far as to use medical and psychiatric terms she has no professional qualification to assign, in order to publicly discredit an autistic person. All of it placed under the cover of protecting the children of a client — an invocation which, on examination, serves less the cause of the children than a set of personal, professional and institutional positions that we will document in detail. Seized of the disciplinary complaint, the Quebec Bar’s syndic dismissed the file out of hand ; seized next on the basis of discrimination, the CDPDJ did exactly the same. This case will be the subject, in the coming weeks, of a full investigative report in collaboration with a partner.

IV — Who does justice belong to?

The case isn’t isolated — and no one corrects it.

If I speak here of that file, it isn’t to detail it — we’ll do that elsewhere. It’s because it isn’t isolated. At EnDroit.ca we receive dozens of testimonies every week from people who have been refused a reasonable accommodation, refused the right to be accompanied, refused the right to a lawyer, refused the right to be heard, refused access to their own court file.

When you line these testimonies up side by side, one question imposes itself : who does justice belong to ? And who has the responsibility to correct its dysfunctions ? The Quebec Bar (Barreau du Québec) ? The Ministry of Justice ? The Quebec Ombudsperson (Protecteur du citoyen) ? The Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission (CDPDJ) ? The Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) ? The courts ? The Office of the Professions (Office des professions du Québec) ? The table below offers a transversal reading, institution by institution, grounded in their public mandates, in the Professional Code, and in the EnDroit.ca reports listed beneath it.

The conclusion is harsh, but it is documentary : there is currently no institution in Quebec whose mandate, structure and independence allow for a real and systemic correction of the dysfunctions of access to justice. Every oversight mechanism in place refers, at one point or another, back to the Bar — or to another body that refers back to yet another. The institutions pass the ball among themselves, never stepping in, in a staggering complexity — and yet what’s at stake is people in situations of vulnerability, who should, on the contrary, benefit from the greatest simplicity.

V — Taking back what was taken

If we are the numbers, we are the legitimacy.

The idea isn’t to collapse every struggle into a single one. A senior is not a racialized person, is not an autistic person, is not a person experiencing homelessness. Each has their own issues, their own vocabulary, their own demands.

But these groups share a common experience : that of having rights written on paper that are not fully applied to them in practice. That of having to prove, at every institutional encounter, that they deserve what should be theirs by default. That of being treated as the exception that, statistically, they are not.

Access to justice — real access, not theoretical access — is not a gift to beg for. It is a right to demand. And it is demanded more effectively when many people demand it together.