Shortly after 10 p.m., on January 4, 2023, the atmosphere is particularly tense on the second floor of the Château Laurier, in Quebec.
On the third day of the simulation of the Quebec Student Parliament (PEQ), the “whips” of the Bleu party. asked caucus members to stay in their rooms. Corridor discussions in preparation for the televised debates the next day, against the Reds, are suspended for the rest of the evening.
In one of the rooms, a participant, Ms. Bélanger, then aged 20, had a panic attack: on high alert, shivering. It was as if there was “imminent danger around her,” summarized in a judicial interrogation Marie-Pier Désilets, then secretary of the board of directors of the Quebec Student Parliamentary Assembly (QSPA), which organized the event.
The cause of her collapse: she believes she saw Mr. Bergeron, a 26-year-old participant, coming towards her, in reality confusing him with another participant. Anxiety also gripped at least four other Blue participants who “locked themselves” in the room. They say they no longer want to be in the same room as Mr. Bergeron.
The Blues then requested the exclusion of the participant, a decision notably based “on the expertise” of Samuel Vaillancourt, a legal technician from the Juripop clinic (specializing in domestic and sexual violence), who is part of the caucus. He is “able to put people at ease and then manage crises like this,” explains QPAT president Hilal Pilavci in her testimony.
Mr. Vaillancourt did not want to grant us an interview for this article.
Informed of the situation by the Bleu.e.s caucus, the QPAT board of directors then expelled Mr. Bergeron from the Student Parliament.
The decision is final. They move him in the middle of the night to another room, on another floor. Ms. Pilavci forbade him from leaving his room, and even from being in the hotel lobby or in the street leading to the National Assembly the next day, her testimony reveals. “We asked him not to come into contact with the PEQ participants, period,” she explains.
“I was told that I had to leave Quebec,” Mr. Bergeron testifies.
Ms. Pilavci, who was also political attaché to Quebec Solidaire MP Vincent Marissal at the time of the events, did not respond to our interview request.
“We don’t want publicity. We would have preferred that there was no newspaper article, that there were no legal proceedings and that the names of all the parties were not found in the media,” insists Me Jean Bergeron, lawyer and father of M . Bergeron, who represents him in the litigation. “But there is an injustice: my client’s fundamental rights were not respected by denying him procedural fairness,” he adds.
In several legal testimonies, the administrators admit that, on the evening of January 4, QPAT did not do the slightest investigation before expelling Mr. Bergeron.
The complainants are never met by the organizers.
Neither does Mr. Bergeron. At the time of his expulsion, he had no idea what he was accused of. He then informs his father, who takes the road from Montreal to Quebec in the middle of a snowstorm with his mother, a psychologist, to join him at the hotel.
The next day, when the administrators finally explained their decision, Ms. Pilavci sent the APEQ’s Sexual Violence Prevention Policy to Mr. Jean Bergeron by email. “I was told that [the decision was made because of] anecdotal events, but that if these events were taken as a whole, we saw a kind of pattern [that] corresponded to the sexual violence policy,” Mr. Bergeron stated in his testimony.
Ten days later, the organization gave him a report explaining that his exclusion from the PEQ was intended to “ensure the comfort of the participants” and “the proper functioning of the simulation for all.”
The document specifies that, in the days preceding the event, certain participants indicated to the officers of the Bleu.e.s caucus that they were uncomfortable being in the presence of Mr. Bergeron because of a “discomfort [which] is based on a dynamic at University “.
A telephone call between her and Mr. Bergeron allegedly followed, “in which unsolicited testimony was shared with the participant (trauma dumping),” the report states. Mr. Bergeron allegedly spoke to him on this occasion about his problems with depression.
The document adds that participants also denounced behaviors that “gave participants the impression that they were inferior because they were women (mansplaining)” during the simulation. Mr. Bergeron is said to have notably challenged the president of one of the parliamentary committees as part of the political contest and demonstrated a lack of receptiveness to “calls to order”. Another participant subsequently had “difficulty concentrating in the presence of [Mr. Bergeron].” “She fears that he will engage in unwanted behavior in her presence (based on events that took place at university). »
Court documents consulted by La Presse show that in the weeks preceding the simulation, Samuel Vaillancourt contacted the secretary of QPAT to denounce Mr. Bergeron: “First of all, I would like to make a trauma warning regarding the subject of this conversation , he wrote to her. It concerns issues of VACS [sexual violence] and harassment. » He then vaguely mentions, without naming Mr. Bergeron, events which would have taken place “about three years ago”, based on the anonymous testimony “of a friend who witnessed and [experienced] a situation of violence sexual” concerning him.
Marie-Pier Désilets specifies in her testimony that the denunciation is linked to an “initiation” to a chalet as part of student activities at the University of Montreal. “It’s a little vague,” she admits, acknowledging that she didn’t try to find out the nature of the gestures: “It’s none of my business. »
A lawyer who is a member of the Bar, Ms. Désilets also denies the fact that the decision to expel Mr. Bergeron is linked to the PEQ’s Sexual Violence Prevention Policy, for which she was responsible. “I relied a lot on my common sense,” she explains in her testimony. Whether or not Mr. Bergeron committed reprehensible actions is not relevant in her decision, she acknowledges. “What’s important is that at that point my simulation can’t continue because I have people who are really not feeling well. »
“Our decision is not based on any wrongdoing. [It] is based on the fact that there are a greater number of people who […] are uncomfortable with the idea that [Mr. Bergeron] remains as a participant,” explains Fanny Dagenais-Dion, another lawyer involved in the decision, who sat on the QPAT board of directors.
The latter denies having committed any act resembling sexual violence and assures that he has never been the subject of a complaint to the University of Montreal.
His expulsion from the simulation was not without consequences. A few days after the events, he learned by email that he was also banned from the Political Science Games at the University of Montreal. One of the Bleu.e.s participants contacted Games management to complain “unofficially” about Mr. Bergeron and to inform them of QPAT’s decision, alleges her lawsuit filed against QPAT and its administrators. Management then allegedly applied its own policy on sexual violence to exclude him, until the university’s Office of Respect for Persons overturned the decision.
Mr. Bergeron was “likened to a rapist and he had suicidal thoughts,” his lawsuit contends. He sometimes “isolates himself in the university toilets, for periods of up to an hour” when he is in classes attended by other QPAT participants, the document adds.