Hearings begin at Supreme Court on constitutionality of random police traffic stops

MONTREAL – The Supreme Court of Canada started hearing a case on Monday about whether it’s constitutional for police to make random traffic stops, after Quebec’s highest court ruled that the practice leads to racial profiling.

The case involves Joseph-Christopher Luamba, a young Montrealer of Haitian descent who said he was repeatedly stopped by police for no apparent reason, beginning shortly after he got his licence in 2019. None of the stops resulted in a ticket.

Luamba and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association went to court to challenge the power of police to stop drivers without a reasonable suspicion that an offence had been committed.

Quebec Superior Court Justice Michel Yergeau sided with Luamba in October 2022, saying that racial profiling exists and that it’s a reality that weighs heavily on Black people. Quebec’s Court of Appeal upheld the ruling in 2024.

A lawyer for the Quebec government told the Supreme Court on Monday that the lower-court decisions deprive police of an important tool to enforce road safety rules. “There is a deterrent factor in routine verification,” Michel Déom said. “If a person knows they can be intercepted at any time to verify their driver’s licence, that has an effect.”

Structured enforcement operations such as drunk driving checkpoints, which are allowed under the law, aren’t enough because they’re easy to avoid in urban areas and hard to use effectively in rural ones.

Déom said the law allowing random stops doesn’t need to be overturned just because some officers carry out “illegal interceptions” based on prejudice.

“Stopping a driver for verification purposes other than to ensure road safety is contrary to the rule of law and constitutes an illegal interpretation,” he said. He noted that Quebec has acknowledged the issue of racial profiling among officers and put measures in place to counter it. 

But Luamba’s lawyer and the CCLA told Canada’s highest court that police stops aren’t random at all and disproportionately affect Black drivers.

“The evidence is clear, racial profiling exists,” Luamba’s lawyer Mike Siméon said Monday. “The power of random interception is applied in a non-random way. Firstly, so it’s not random, it’s applied arbitrarily to a segment of the population.”

He said the stops have led to what he called a “systemic violation of the fundamental rights of thousands of Canadians” and of Black men in particular.

“A young Black man that hasn’t been stopped in a purely random way in their life — that’s an oddity, something almost unheard of,” he said. 

Yergeau’s 2022 ruling invalidated the rules established by a 1990 Supreme Court decision — R. v. Ladouceur — which found that police were justified when they issued a summons to an Ontario driver who had been stopped randomly and who had been driving with a suspended licence. The high court ruled that random stops were the only way to determine whether drivers are properly licensed, whether a vehicle’s seatbelts work and whether a driver is impaired.

But Yergeau wrote it was time for the justice system to declare this power, which he said violates certain constitutional rights, obsolete and inoperable, as well as the article of Quebec’s provincial Highway Safety Code that allows it.

On Monday, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association argued the Ladouceur decision had removed limits on police power that need to be put back in place to prevent profiling.

“The evidence is clear that it’s the very nature of the power, unconstrained, low visibility, discretionary, unreviewable, standardless, that gives rise to the discriminatory effects under Section 15,” said lawyer Lex Gill, referring to a Section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantees equality rights.

Gill noted that police can still conduct stops under designated road safety programs, put checkpoints in place, carry out “lawful, reasonable, suspicion-based” investigations and pull people over when an infraction is committed.

“If this court upholds the Court of Appeal’s decision, the sky has not fallen in Quebec, it will not fall,” she said. 

The Supreme Court hearings continue on Tuesday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 19, 2026.