Quebec’s Injustice System

The night before her final court date, Vivian slept on the floor of a church basement.

She was a defendant in Quebec’s criminal justice system when she laid her head down that evening. By lunchtime the next day, Vivian would be a free woman. 

It seemed so easy when she thought about it that way. One minute, Vivian lived under the constant threat of imprisonment and then, after a few remarks from the court, she could have her life back. 

Or, at least, what is left of it.

The story of Vivian, who did not want her full name published, seems almost simple when presented this way. It is anything but. And, according to her lawyer, Quebec’s penal system is overloaded with cases like Vivian’s, even though she should never have been in prison to begin with. 

In reality, the three years between Vivian’s arraignment and the Crown’s decision to withdraw charges on Jan. 27 nearly killed her. Once the owner of a successful cleaning business, Vivian spent those years sleeping in shelters and under the stars, hauling everything she owned in a pair of duffel bags, living in a constant state of vigilance.

One night on the streets, Vivian was jumped and beaten so badly she dislocated her hip. Vivian’s doctor prescribed Dilaudid for the chronic, around-the-clock pain. But that drug, which is six times stronger than morphine, led to a physical dependence on opioids.

In the chaos following her assault, Vivian missed multiple court dates, triggering a warrant for her arrest. By the time the cops picked her up a few months later, Vivian was a daily opioid user. She lined up at the pharmacy every morning to get a dose of methadone, not so she could be high but so she could avoid opioid withdrawal.

Vivian knew, when the officers put her on a prison bus to the Leclerc Institution that weekend, that it would probably be days before her next dose of methadone. And that terrified her.

“In prison, nobody likes a junkie; they cry, they shit their pants, they puke, they’re not winning any popularity contests,” said Vivian, during an interview in a café on St-Laurent Blvd. “I was four days without my medicine and I did everything I could not to let them see me sweat. It was only just before my court appearance that they gave me the methadone. 

“Going through withdrawal in prison, it’s definitely gonna make you rethink a lot of your life choices.”

Vivian wanted to look her best when the morning of her acquittal arrived. 

She brushed her teeth, fixed her hair and put on a coral lipstick that matched her outfit. Still reeling from a leg injury, Vivian left the Parc Ave. shelter on crutches and set out across the city to meet her lawyer.

“We’re overworked. We have tons of files, and so sometimes you get something on paper, and you go ‘I just don’t have the time or the energy to go through with this,’” said Alexandra Olshefsky, Vivian’s legal aid lawyer. “Then I met her, and within five minutes I was ready to do anything and everything to help.”

Of the 60,000 criminal cases heard in Quebec’s courts every year, about 75 per cent involve the services of a lawyer in legal aid. It’s also a crucial service in youth protection cases, where children whose safety is at risk would not otherwise have legal representation. In total, the province processes roughly a quarter million legal aid applications every year. That’s according to the Commission des services juridiques, the government-funded body that oversees the program.

Some 475 lawyers work full-time on these cases alongside 588 support staff. Though that may seem like an army of workers, they handle less than half the legal aid cases in Quebec. The majority are handled by private practice lawyers.

But the private sector is gradually abandoning the program. Between 2018 and 2023, legal aid participation from the private practice lawyers dropped by 22 per cent, according to a report by Quebec’s auditor general. The report found that low pay was a huge factor in this decline.

Rather than being compensated for their time, these lawyers receive a flat fee ranging from $600 for a bail hearing to $2,000 for a criminal case with a preliminary inquiry.

In December, the Quebec government passed Bill 78 to find new ways for private practice lawyers to be remunerated on legal aid files. But the government is still negotiating with the private sector to determine these new tariffs.

“Right now, if the file lasts 15 minutes or three hours, it’s the same price. In many cases and many files, we’re really underpaid,” said Chantale Plante, a family law lawyer in Chicoutimi. Plante is also on a committee leading negotiations with the government. “Of course, if young lawyers saw better pay from the legal aid system, they’d be more willing to take on these causes. 

“Instead, we’re seeing more and more people representing themselves, asking the judge to postpone their hearing because they couldn’t find a lawyer. It causes delays, it costs the system money.”

Throughout a months-long investigation, The Rover met with former inmates, prison guards, prosecutors and researchers who all agree that a lack of access to justice has grave consequences. It’s creating a bottleneck in the courts, overcrowding provincial jails and contributing to violence across Quebec’s network of prisons. 

With little other recourse, many Quebecers wind up behind bars simply because they simply renounce their legal rights. That’s what happened to Vivian, who, in 2023, spent four days in jail for missing a court date. 

While provincial prisons are meant for sentences of two years less a day, there are hundreds of inmates awaiting trial for crimes that carry a federal sentence. This includes gangsterism, cross-border drug trafficking, homicide, sexual assault and armed assault. In total, about 60 per cent of Quebec’s prison population is in jail awaiting trial, according to the researcher Catherine Chesney, a professor at Université du Québec à Montréal’s school of social work. 

So for someone like Vivian — who was inside for missing a court date — she walked the same halls as suspected killers and hardened gang members. 

But unlike a federal penitentiary, where inmates can access programs to help them rehabilitate or heal from their trauma, there are almost no such programs in provincial jails. At Montreal’s Bordeaux men’s prison, there is one psychologist on staff for over 1,000 inmates. 

“It doesn’t rehabilitate you, it’s just a place to do dead time,” said Vivian. “If anything, provincial jail is where you go to learn how to become a better criminal.”

***

“It takes a certain kind of person to work criminal law,” said Alexandra Olshefsky, in between bites of cold sausage from her bagged lunch. 

“A ton of my colleagues are triathletes, ironman racers or just sporty in general. Or just maybe intense interest in things, whether it’s cooking or painting or writing, there’s not a lot of us who do things halfway.”

Olshefsky is about six feet tall with limbs like spindles, but in her day, she was a killer on the rugby pitch. While the larger women battled in the trenches, it was her job to pick up the ball and run with it. This inevitably led to violence; torn muscles, chipped teeth and bloody noses were all her stock in trade. 

In 2007, while playing for the Concordia Stingers, Olshefsky won a national award in recognition of her excellence on the field and as a volunteer working with Montreal’s homeless population.

Throughout three days of shadowing Olshefsky in court, The Rover saw firsthand what it takes to be an effective legal aid lawyer. True to her rugby days, the 38-year-old did not stop moving her legs — scurrying from her office on the fifth floor to bail hearings on the third and negotiations with the Crown in offices and hallways throughout the cavernous building.

Since the threshold for a person to receive legal aid in Quebec is that they earn less than $27,755 a year, a high percentage of Olshefsky’s clients are homeless.

“Often, they’re just guilty of the crime of being poor,” Olshefsky said. “When you miss a court date because your phone was stolen on the streets or you’re so busy surviving that you forget to show up, that’s when the court system gets its hands on you. And once that happens, it’s hard to live a normal life again.”

But though many of her clients are difficult to pin down for a meeting, Olshefsky has a knack for finding people who may not always want to be found. With Vivian, she knew the 49-year-old went to a downtown pharmacy every day to get her methadone. So if Vivian’s phone was stolen or she’d run out of minutes, Olshefsky left a message at the pharmacy.

They met to discuss her court case on a sunny morning in September. Vivian was wearing a blue tracksuit with a pair of Air Jordans and her hair tied in a bun. She carried a paperback novel and walked with a limp. 

“Hi, my dear, how are you?” Olshefky said, with her usual smile. “I think we’re going to be able to quash the arrest warrant and get you through this relatively unscathed.”

“Yay!” Vivian said, her eyes welling.

“Are you in detox?” the lawyer asked.

“I’m looking,” Vivian replied. “Thank you, you’re amazing.”

“I assure you, I’m not amazing, there are people who don’t like me, I promise,” Olshefsky said. “I think we’re just a good fit.”

Launched in 1972, with the goal that justice shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford to pay for it, Quebec’s legal aid system is bursting at the seams. Its annual budget — which includes funding for the 12,000 children seeking help for adoption and neglect cases — is over $230 million. 

And yet, every year, tens of thousands of applications are rejected.

The program processes an average of about 231,000 applications every year and accepts 182,000 of them. Among those rejected, over 30,000 were because the applications were missing information required by the Commission des services juridiques.

A co-pay program was introduced in 1996 to expand access to legal aid by allowing people with slightly higher incomes to pay a partial fee (between $100 and $800). According to a November 2023 report by Québec’s Auditor-General on the Legal Aid system, despite its intent, the program is underutilized. In 2022-2023, only 5 per cent of accepted applications (8,700 out of 176,000) were under the contributory program, with nearly 1,800 cases abandoned because applicants refused to pay the contribution.

Sophie Gagnon, who leads the non-profit legal clinic Juripop, says she worries that the barriers to access in our legal aid system are causing the most vulnerable among us to simply turn their back on the justice system.

“Legal aid doesn’t just look at your revenue, they look at your assets,” Gagnon told The Rover. “You can be on a work stoppage, or maybe you lost your job, but if you have a student savings account for your kids or you inherited a piece of a house, you’re inadmissible.”

People self-representing in court isn’t a choice so much as a last resort that far too many Quebecers are stuck with, she said. 

“It happens because you’re vulnerable, you’re socially isolated, you’re poor,” Gagnon said. “It means people just don’t win when they’re in front of a judge by themselves. Most of the people who can’t access a lawyer basically just drop out of the system and cede their rights.”

What would have happened had Vivian not found legal representation in her criminal case?

“Because of her missed court dates, she probably would have been kept in prison until her hearings and then pleaded out,” Olshefsky said. “Prison, even when you’re not a violent offender, is the thing you really want to avoid. It can change you in ways that aren’t always reversible.”

***

Built on the northern bank of the Des Prairies River in 1961, Leclerc Institution was a federal prison throughout most of its history. 

The building housed maximum security male offenders until 2013, when the Harper government shut it down, citing “crumbling infrastructure, costly upkeep and severe limitations” in managing a prison population.

Three years later, Quebec emptied out its main women’s prison — the aging Maison Tanguay — and transferred hundreds of inmates into the empty penitentiary while awaiting construction of a new facility. Three former inmates told l’Actualité the prison gets so cold in the winter, women sleep in their winter coats.

“If they did any kind of renovations, I didn’t see them,” said Vivian, who served a four-day stint inside after missing her court appearance last year. “The paint on the walls is peeling, everything smells like mould, there’s tons of rats, the toilets constantly overflow with shit and there’s bugs all over the place.”

Last winter, a woman died inside after she’d complained for hours about trouble breathing. The victim screamed for help until she got so weak her heart stopped. That’s when her fellow inmates performed CPR on her, according to a report by Le Devoir’s Jean-François Nadeau. 

Her death came just weeks after another inmate — a 42-year-old mother of three — died by suicide in the women’s prison. The conditions at Leclerc are the subject of a class action lawsuit that alleges prisoners’ Charter Rights are violated by unnecessary strip searches, inadequate heating, inadequate water quality, a lack of access to basic healthcare, the presence of vermin and a litany of other apparent violations.

“The problems we’re raising — whether it’s not being able to access your medicine or sleeping in a cold dirty cell or being subjected to constant strip searches — these are all going against the very mission of our prisons,” said Clara Poissant-Lespérance, the lawyer leading the class action.

“The prison’s goal, according to the law, is to take care of these women and reform them. You’re not supposed to exact retribution on them for their crimes. If they need their methadone, and they were taking this every day outside of prison, that’s a medical right. And if they can’t access it, they’re much more likely to engage in defiant behaviour and even violence. 

“So we’re arguing that the prison’s negligence is putting these women in danger, but it’s also putting the guards in danger.”

The problems plaguing Leclerc aren’t limited to that one prison. By almost any metric, Quebec’s provincial jails are among the worst in Canada. Between 2009 and 2022, some 256 people died inside Quebec’s jails, according to a study by the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Its average prison population, over those 13 years, was 4,903. In Ontario, a province that incarcerated an average 8,106 inmates during that same period, there were 296 deaths. But this isn’t public information. The only reason we know how many people die inside Quebec’s prisons is that a team of researchers at Université du Québec à Montréal fought the government for answers.

For Professor Catherine Chesnay, it was her work with former inmates at Leclerc that caused her to wonder exactly how deadly the prison was. 

“At first we just wanted to know if the transfer from Tanguay prison to Leclerc was putting more lives at risk,” said Chesnay, during a telephone interview with The Rover. “But when I started looking for that data, it was really hard to find. (Unlike Ontario), Quebec doesn’t publish statistics on prison deaths on the Public Security Minister’s website. They weren’t included in the annual reports either. So I started asking myself, ‘Wait, beyond Leclerc, how many people are dying in our prisons?’”

The short answer: a lot, and far too often under nebulous circumstances.

In fact, through a series of access to information requests, the UQAM researchers determined 71 people, or over one quarter of the deaths they uncovered, died from an “undetermined cause.” Deaths by suicide killed 98 people between 2009 and 2022, homicides accounted for two deaths during the period with the remaining 85 being of natural causes.

But Chesnay says “natural causes” may be somewhat misleading.

“You can die of pneumonia at 40 years old — because you can’t get the right treatment — and that would count as death by natural causes,” she said. “This probably wouldn’t happen outside a prison.”

Of course, the death rate in Quebec jails — measured in deaths per 100,000 inmates — exploded during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rate went from 379 in 2019 to 483 the following year before peaking at 802 in 2021.

“Women, during the pandemic, would go over 10 days without a shower because of the strict lockdown protocols and chronic understaffing,” Chesnay said. “Women who came from Nunavik to the south could spend up to 40 days in isolation before being transferred to the general population.

“The isolation of COVID-19 led to many, many suicides. But to blame it all on COVID would be to ignore the fact that — well before the virus — there was a huge rise in prison deaths across the province.”

During the worst of the COVID-19 days, prisoners would be in their cells for 23 hours a day for weeks on end. Two inmates who did time during those years spoke of having suicidal ideation and described periods where they struggled to distinguish reality from the anxious thoughts racing through their heads.

One told l’Actualité he was in such a dark place, during COVID, that one night he wrapped his bed sheet around his neck and tried to hang himself. His cellmate woke up when he heard him gasping for air and saved his life.

The UQAM study found that more people died in Quebec’s prisons by suicide (34) between 2019 and 2022 than from natural causes (20) — a category that includes deaths from COVID-19.

Chesnay says overcrowding and understaffing are huge factors in the mental health crisis inside Quebec’s prisons.

“More inmates and fewer guards means less time outside your cell, less access to the library or other activities that can give people a break from the constant stress of prison,” she said. “When you don’t get those breaks, you see people alone in their cells, with their thoughts. Some people start to use drugs because — while there are little rehabilitation services in our prisons — there’s plenty of drugs.”

When Vivian was in Leclerc and going through withdrawal, she managed to get her sister to e-transfer $50 to a cellmate in exchange for less than a gram of cannabis. She said smoking pot helped with the worst of the symptoms.

“You’re not allowed to smoke inside, but we smoked like chimneys,” Vivian said. “The guards look the other way cause it keeps us less edgy. Makes their jobs a bit easier. I couldn’t have access to my methadone — which was prescribed to me by a doctor — but I could have just about any drug I wanted for the right price.”

Cocaine, MDMA, speed, fentanyl and a litany of other mind-altering drugs are dropped into the prison yard by drone and while some are intercepted, Vivian and six other former inmates who spoke to l’Actualité said getting drugs inside was never a problem. 

But while the drugs may provide some form of self-medication for the inmates, it also fuels a black market where accounts are settled with makeshift knives and bludgeons. One former inmate with friends still inside Montreal’s Bordeaux prison sent The Rover a video of a brutal assault he claims was tied to prison gang activity. 

The video, stemming from an incident in 2023, depicts a prostrate man being kicked in the face by two inmates while a third stands guard and a fourth films the assault. As the victim cowers in the corner of a dark cell, his assailants calmly pull out blades and begin slashing his neck, his arms and torso. 

Soon, so much blood is pooled underneath him that he slips in it. Perhaps what’s most alarming about the footage — aside from the painful groans and screams — is how brazen it was. The footage, which clearly shows one of the assailants’ faces, was widely circulated within the prison and wound up being leaked to a journalist and broadcast by TVA Nouvelles.

The victim — who was 36 at the time of the attack — survived, but his assailants were never charged. 

This violence isn’t limited to prisoners. 

Three former inmates interviewed by l’Actualité described both witnessing and being subject to excessive force from the guards. Sometimes it was in response to a perceived physical threat, but they also described incidents where inmates were dragged into a room and beaten for mouthing off.

Before the morning shift, on Jan. 30, the guard’s union marched outside Leclerc Institution to denounce understaffing, forced overtime and an increasingly violent workplace. Speaking to The Rover under condition of anonymity, one union member described the trauma of finding inmates dead, unresponsive or mutilated in their cells.

“I know we’re the big bad guards but it fucks with you to see that much violence and death,” the guard said. “You’re not the same anymore but you keep going to work until one day you can’t anymore.”

In a press release, the guard’s union described being bitten, spat on and punched as a near-daily part of the job. Last December, an inmate at the Sorel-Tracy detention centre bludgeoned a guard over a dozen times, nearly blinding him in one eye. 

Experts say the most dangerous part of jail isn’t necessarily what happens when you’re inside, but what happens when you go back out into a world you’re not prepared to face.

“When they release an inmate, they’re just giving them a bus ticket, and that’s it,” Chesnay said. “You’re released into nothingness.”

Olshefsky says she’s lost clients who overdosed soon after being released from provincial lockup.

“You get out, you have all this trauma, and you don’t know what to do with it, so maybe you use,” said Olshefsky. “And often, after months inside, your body can’t handle drugs the way it used to. I wish there weren’t clients who, from one day to the next, they’re not going to be there anymore. And that’s criminal law. We think of it in this black and white way, and we think that there are perpetrators and there are victims. But the reality is, in most cases, every perpetrator is a victim too.”

***

Before she was a criminal in the eyes of Quebec’s Crown prosecutor, Vivian was the victim of a violent crime.

It was after the clock struck midnight on the New Year of 2022 that she met her abuser. 

They were at a loft party near St-Laurent Blvd. and Vivian was spinning old school hip hop on the turntables. The party was a violation against Quebec’s Covid curfew and its moratorium on private gatherings but after years of feeling cooped up, Vivian needed to get out. 

Somewhere in the midst of the bass and bounce of Slick Rick and Grandmaster Flash, a man approached her with a big ask.

“He said, ‘Look, I’m homeless and I don’t have a place to stay, can I crash at yours?’” Vivian said. “I had come from the West Island, living in my cushy little life so I’m not always super street smart. So I said, ‘look, you can stay at mine but tomorrow morning you gotta go.’”

She slept in her bed, he crashed on the couch and, the next afternoon, Vivian’s plan was to make him some fried chicken and send him on his way. Then came a knock at the door.

“So I open it and I get rushed by all these guys who just walked right in,” said Vivian. “Then they just set up shop and start smoking crack. Pretty soon, it was clear they were going to turn my place into a traphouse. Somewhere they could buy and sell drugs without the cops watching them.”

When Vivian told them to leave, the man she had just sheltered grabbed a pair of knives from the kitchen and held them against her throat for hours. The scene became utterly surreal, with strange men freebasing cocaine on her couch while she feared for her life. 

Pretty soon, she started to panic and grabbed the knives with her bare hand. 

“I squeezed and bent the blades until blood ran down my arm,” Vivian said. “He wrestled it back and laughed at me. He kept saying, ‘You panicked! You panicked!’ They had found a credit card bill with my mother’s name and address on it. He told me she’d be dead if I went to the cops. I was being kept awake for days at a time. I wasn’t thinking straight. So I just figured that if I left the apartment and stopped paying rent, they’d all get kicked out.”

Vivian’s life wasn’t perfect before that fateful night but things were trending in the right direction. She had a successful cleaning business and an apartment in her favourite neighbourhood. Her decision to leave her home and live on the street instead of seeking legal help would wind up costing her dearly.

Eventually, her landlord evicted Vivian and shuttered the apartment, getting the crack dealer out of her life. Then, one night in the spring of 2023, when Vivian came back to collect her things, her landlord called the police and claimed she’d broken into the apartment.

“I kind of mouthed off to the cop and I was so mad I gave him a fake name,” Vivian said. “That didn’t end so well for me.”

She was picked, charged with breaking and entering and obstruction of justice for giving the officer a false name. That cascaded into the missed court date and put Vivian’s life into a tailspin.

Experts say the beginning of Vivian’s tailspin, interpersonal violence, is alarmingly common among women inmates. In fact, a 2018 study commissioned by the Ministry of Public Security surveyed 6,661 women who’d been in prison, finding that 64.1 per cent of them were victims of a crime before they became perpetrators.

“Clearly, interpersonal violence is a personal problem that people endure, but it is also a social problem and public health issue. It undermines the well-being and safety of communities, not just individuals and families,” said Penny Shtull. 

Shtull is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Norwich University and an expert on violent crime. 

“A lot of women and children are homeless as a result of interpersonal violence,” she continued. Sadly, running to the streets can be perceived as safer than staying in one’s own home. If they go out on the streets, dealing with homelessness provides a whole host of other social problems: food insecurity, unemployment, lack of education or a disruption in education, susceptibility to human traffickers, drug traffickers, predators who are looking to exploit these vulnerable individuals.”

In 2021, the CAQ government acknowledged the problem that so many victims of conjugal violence have in exercising their rights before the courts. Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette mandated the Conseil des services juridiques and Juripop to provide survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault with free legal advice regardless of their income.

Two years later, Jolin-Barrette ordered an expansion of the pilot program to include a team that could represent these survivors in court. A network of women’s shelters and advocates praised the program as an essential tool for survivors to exercise their most basic rights.

On Wednesday, Jolin-Barrette announced the program’s funding would be discontinued.

***

The committee negotiating better pay for private practice lawyers in the legal aid system came up with 224 recommendations in its 2022 report.

Chief among them, that the fees for private practice lawyers align with their workload. It also recommends the cap on how much legal aid fees a private practice lawyer go from $140,000 to $200,000. 

So far, Plante says the Coalition Avenir Québec government hasn’t been too receptive.

“Right now, they’re in cost-cutting mode, they’re freezing new hires,” said Plante, one of the committee’s main negotiators. “So it’ll be difficult to get any increase.”

If anything, the CAQ is working to make negotiations harder for the committee, which is funded by Quebec’s Bar Association. The CAQ’s proposed legislation to implement some of these recommendations, Bill 78, would also prevent the Bar Association from funding the committee, giving the government more power in negotiations.

The Rover asked Jolin-Barrette’s office if it plans on raising the financial threshold for access to legal aid and if it might widen the areas covered by the program to include more family law, immigration and youth protection law to help Quebec’s most vulnerable people. 

A spokesperson for the minister told The Rover, “No request for legal aid is refused for lack of lawyers.” As for raising the threshold, “we’re analyzing the situation,” she said.

At Juripop, clients frequently reach out for help after they’ve been denied legal aid, said Sophie Gagnon, the service’s director general. 

“They are the working poor, falling between the threads of the social safety net,” Gagnon said. “They are everyday people struggling with separations, neighbours, drafting a will, these people can’t defend their rights. We live in a society with excellent rights on paper. But if those rights aren’t respected or they’re compromised, there aren’t too many services that allow people to defend their rights in court.”

Juripop represents folks who are eligible for legal aid, and they add 15 per cent to the $27,755 threshold.

“We also represent people in areas not covered by legal aid: the victims of sexual violence suing their assailants, for instance,” Gagnon said. “We offer free services to cancer patients and people with multiple sclerosis, to those who have been victimized by sexual assault or conjugal violence, to the elderly. The common denominator is that these are all vulnerable people.” 

***

In the right hands, Vivian’s case was surprisingly easy to resolve.

The whole thing — the breaking-and-entering charge leading to Vivian giving a false name to a cop and then missing court appearances — could be traced back to a simple lie. Vivian never broke into her old apartment building. We know this because Olshefsky got her hands on security footage from the night of the 911 call, which clearly showed Vivian using her keys to enter the building she’d lived in for years. 

“I was done moving out, I was going to pick up my cat,” she said. “We had to go through all that trouble, I had to spend time in lockup, I wound up on the street where I got jumped and badly injured. And that turned me onto Dilaudid, which really fucked my life up. The pain is so bad that I can’t work anymore. I hate not working, I hate sleeping in a shelter every night.”

When she met up with l’Actualité at the end of January, Vivian was 10 minutes early and dressed to the nines. She wore a black beret over a camouflage cable knit sweater with leather pants and a celtic cross dangling from her neck.

People are easily charmed by Vivian because she’s kind, funny, and she’s painfully self-aware.

“She has a spark to her,” Olshefsky said. “She’s kind, she is willing and wanting to seek help. Not just for herself, but the people around her. The thing that makes it easiest for me, as an attorney, Vivian is not someone to blame everybody else. 

“She is someone who, despite living in some of the worst circumstances, she has such positivity and a light to her, and she takes ownership of her actions. She is the first person to add nuance. She is blameless in these circumstances but she’s the first one to say, ‘Well no, these are my actions and those were my decisions’ and how could you not want to represent that person?

“Vivian is the kind of person that, when she decides that she wants to make a change in her life, I really think she has the strength and the fortitude of character to do so. It’s inspiring.”

On the day Vivian’s charges were quashed, Olshefsky began the work of getting her in touch with people who could help her find housing and access services to help deal with the trauma from her assault. And as she always does, Olshefksy made sure to let her client know she could call anytime, day or night.

“My life isn’t that bad, plenty of people have it a lot worse than I do but when you think of how easy it was for Alexandra (Olshefsky) to fix this, why did I have to go through it all?” Vivian said. “I’ll never be able to repay her for everything she did. I made a lot of mistakes in my life and sometimes that’s all people see.

“With Alexandra, she doesn’t look at the mistakes, she looks at me. And I’ll never forget that.”

In the days before finalizing this article, l’Actualité reached out to Vivian, leaving text messages and calling her phone every morning for a week. We also left a message at her pharmacy but haven’t heard back as of publication time. 

When you are up against the void, Olshefsky said, you can’t expect to win every time.

“But understanding that doesn’t make it any easier.”

This article was made possible by a grant from the Association des journalists indépendents du Québec, an organization dedicated to defending the rights of freelance journalists and promoting press freedom.