Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Responsibility of a third-party garnishee (Centre de formation Le Phare / Services Groupe Action inc. – SGA) under articles 711 and 717 C.p.c. for failing to declare and for making a false declaration in the context of judgment enforcement.
• Assessment of whether SGA was in default by not responding in time, or at all, to garnishment declarations regarding amounts payable to judgment debtor Jean Junior Joanis.
• Credibility analysis of conflicting testimony about Joanis’s real role at SGA (consultant versus de facto manager/president of business development) and whether he received or was to receive remuneration.
• Determination that SGA’s negative declaration, denying any sums held or to be paid to Joanis, was inaccurate given the evidence of his operational control and consulting fees paid in 2025–2026.
• Application of jurisprudence on “gross negligence,” bad faith, and the broad scope of the tierce-saisi’s duty to declare both present and future debts toward the debtor.
• Consequence of non-compliance: SGA is condemned as if it were the debtor itself to pay the CPAS the full judgment debt of 31,560.17 $, plus legal interest, additional indemnity (art. 1619 C.c.Q.) and costs.

Facts of the case

In November 2021, the Comité paritaire des agents de sécurité (CPAS), the joint committee responsible for administering the Decree on security guards under the Loi sur les décrets de convention collective, brought an action against Jean Junior Joanis. CPAS alleged that Haute sécurité et investigation inc. (Haute sécurité), of which Joanis was an administrator, was an employer subject to the Decree and had failed to pay its employees the wages they were owed for services rendered. Acting under its statutory authority, CPAS pursued the administrator personally to recover those unpaid sums for the benefit of the affected employees.
Joanis did not respond to the proceedings. On 14 March 2022, the Court of Québec rendered a default judgment against him, condemning him to pay 31,560.17 $ to the CPAS, together with legal interest and the additional indemnity under article 1619 of the Civil Code of Québec from the dates of the various underlying wage claims. Those claims dated back to 2015–2017 and were grouped by claim numbers with specific starting dates for interest.
In order to enforce that judgment, CPAS turned to third-party garnishment. It targeted Centre de formation Le Phare (Services Groupe Action inc.) (SGA), a corporation registered in December 2021 that operates in personnel placement and training. The corporate registry showed that Myrline Constant was SGA’s main shareholder, president and secretary, while Joanis appeared in the Québec enterprise register as an administrator and vice-president of SGA between 15 October 2023 and 28 June 2025.
In August 2024, CPAS served SGA with a notice of execution (salary garnishment). SGA responded on 1 October 2024, stating that Joanis was not in its employ. In December 2024, based on the information that Joanis was listed as an administrator at SGA, CPAS instructed bailiffs to proceed again, this time with both a garnishment on “sums” and a garnishment on salary. On 9 December 2024, SGA was served with a revised notice of execution, a declaration for third-party garnishee relating to sums held, and a declaration as employer. The documents clearly stated SGA had 10 days to respond. Joanis himself was served with the revised notice on 14 December 2024.
SGA never answered the declaration as employer. For the declaration regarding sums held, it only replied on 21 January 2025—well beyond the 10-day deadline—declaring negatively that it held no funds belonging to Joanis. No motion was filed by SGA to be relieved from its default to declare within the statutory time limit.

Procedural background and legal framework

The court framed the main issues as follows: (a) whether SGA failed to declare the sums owed to Joanis within the prescribed time; (b) whether SGA made a false declaration; and (c) whether SGA should be condemned to pay the debt due to CPAS as if it were itself the debtor.
Relying on article 683 C.p.c., the court recalled that all participants in the enforcement process, including a third-party garnishee, must act in good faith, collaborate in proper execution of the judgment, and refrain from obstructing it. The judge also drew on the case law defining when a third-party in default might nonetheless be relieved from its failure to declare, emphasizing that relief is generally unavailable where the third-party’s conduct shows carelessness, bad faith, or fraud. “Gross negligence,” as cited from prior decisions, was described as a disproportionate indifference to an obligation, a culpable attitude, or an obstinate refusal to assume responsibility.
Article 711 C.p.c. sets the time limit for a third-party garnishee to respond to the garnishment declaration, while article 717 C.p.c. establishes the sanction. Under article 717 C.p.c., a third-party garnishee may be condemned to pay the creditor as if it were the debtor where it is in default for failing to declare, for failing to retain or deposit amounts, or for making a false declaration. These scenarios are alternative, not cumulative: any one of them can trigger the sanction. The judge also reiterated the principle, confirmed by jurisprudence, that the third-party’s duty to declare encompasses not only debts already owed to the debtor at the time of service of the garnishment but also amounts that may become due in the future.
CPAS first attempted to have SGA condemned through a motion presented by bailiffs in June 2025, but the court noted that under the procedure rules, bailiffs were not competent to present such a demand; this must be done by a lawyer or by the party itself when self-represented. CPAS therefore properly re-served a new application through its counsel on 20 November 2025 and later amended it to add the allegation of “false declaration” after an inspection visit in January 2026.

Evidence regarding Joanis’s role with SGA

A major evidentiary question was whether SGA truly owed or would owe money to Joanis. SGA maintained that Joanis was only an occasional consultant who volunteered his services almost entirely for free, except for modest, irregular amounts supposedly paid as symbolic tokens of appreciation. It further argued that Joanis had no employment relationship with SGA and did not receive regular remuneration.
Joanis and Constant testified that they met during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Joanis ran Haute sécurité. When he became ill and was hospitalized, one of Haute sécurité’s contracts involving nursing personnel had to be performed in the Joliette region. Through an intermediary nurse, he met Constant, who allegedly helped him fulfill the contract without financial compensation, giving rise to a strong sense of personal gratitude on his part.
Years later, in March 2023, Constant sought support to develop SGA’s security guard agency operations. Friends from the Haitian community recommended Joanis. When they reconnected, Joanis viewed it as his turn to help Constant, but he insisted that he must hold a title—specifically “president of business development”—the same title he claimed in his own company, Gestion Vigilance et Performance inc., and one he said he always uses when doing recruitment for any company.
On CPAS’s side, four current or former SGA employees testified about their interactions with Joanis. Their evidence was consistent: they were hired between March and June 2025 by Joanis, who introduced himself as SGA’s person in charge or its president of business development. He handled their hiring documents, communicated their work schedules and training information by text from his own phone, and arranged payment of their salaries from SGA’s bank account. They viewed him as their boss and dealt with him for payroll problems or absences, while some had little or no direct contact with Constant.
Additional neutral evidence came from Louis-Dominique Pampalon of the City of Québec. In January 2025, SGA bid on a contract for security guards at the city’s energy recovery complex. Constant had filled out the tender forms, but when the contract was awarded in April 2025, the contractual documentation identified Joanis as the person responsible for the contract on SGA’s side. At the introduction meeting when the contract took effect in late May 2025, both Constant and Joanis attended, and Joanis was presented as president of business development and the contract lead. In practice, Pampalon dealt exclusively with Joanis on personnel issues, billing, and non-compliance situations, as confirmed by email correspondence.
The court gave these employees and Pampalon’s testimony a high probative value because they were neutral, disinterested witnesses. In contrast, the defence witnesses—two current SGA employees and Joanis and Constant themselves—offered a narrative that the court found rehearsed, internally inconsistent, and lacking credibility. They claimed that Joanis simply searched for contracts, dealt with marketing and business development, visited the office one or two days per week, and received only commissions on contracts, not salary. However, this portrayal was undermined by the concrete evidence of his frontline management role with staff and clients.

Credibility findings and consulting payments

The judge carefully evaluated the credibility of Joanis and Constant. Joanis gave contradictory accounts about who sent the emails to SGA’s employees and the City of Québec. At first he insisted that Constant was actually sending the emails that carried his signature, using his name merely so he would remain the contact person for SGA’s clients and employees. He later admitted that he himself sent the emails but claimed that every message was pre-approved by Constant and that he merely executed instructions without decision-making authority. The judge found these explanations implausible and his testimony not credible.
Constant acknowledged issuing six receipts to Joanis for “consulting fees” between 30 May 2025 and 30 January 2026, totalling 1,700 $, and admitted there were two or three additional similar payments. She maintained that most of his work remained unpaid, allegedly a “balancing of the scales” for the assistance she had once given him during the pandemic. Yet the judge found it highly unlikely that someone who played such a central role in business development, employee management, and client relations at SGA would be effectively volunteering, compensated only through sporadic “thank-you” payments.
The court also examined the question of why Joanis had been listed as an administrator and vice-president of SGA. Constant claimed that this was done solely because, in a separate process to obtain a permit from the Ministry of Education to offer training for care-aides, SGA had been told it needed a board of directors. She said she therefore gathered various persons linked to SGA, including employees and associates such as Joanis, and registered them at the corporate registry to satisfy this requirement. Once SGA’s permit application was refused, his name was allegedly removed from the registry.
No documentary proof of this permit process, the Ministry’s requirements, or the refusal decision was produced. The judge was particularly struck that Joanis’s removal from the corporate registry occurred just five days after SGA received service of CPAS’s motion seeking to have SGA condemned as a third-party for Joanis’s debt. This timing, combined with the absence of corroborating evidence, cast serious doubt on Constant’s explanation.
An inspection visit by CPAS inspector-auditor Valérie Constantin on 15 January 2026 further undermined SGA’s position. She overheard two SGA employees discussing Joanis’s presence at the office. When she questioned Constant, the latter denied that Joanis came to the office and became angry when confronted with what the inspector had just heard. The court concluded that Constant actively fostered ambiguity and confusion regarding Joanis’s true role within SGA and that Joanis did the same by claiming to run his own separate company and to receive commissions from various clients, again without any reliable documentary proof.

False declaration and default to declare

The court held that SGA was clearly in default of its procedural obligations. It never responded to the employer-type garnishment declaration served in December 2024 and only replied late to the declaration on sums held. No attempt was made to seek relief from the default under the Code of Civil Procedure. Given this pattern and Constant’s admission that she did not give the garnishment documents the attention they required, the court characterized her handling of the matter as careless and amounting to gross negligence in the sense recognized by prior case law.
On the question of whether SGA made a false declaration, the judge concluded that its negative statement in January 2025—that SGA held no sums belonging to Joanis—was inaccurate in light of the evidence. Jurisprudence makes clear that the third-party’s duty covers not only existing debts at the time of service but also sums that may become due thereafter. When SGA responded to the garnishment in January 2025, it failed to disclose that it intended to pay Joanis for consulting services in the months following. Yet the record showed that between May 2025 and January 2026, SGA did in fact pay him consulting fees, documented by receipts signed by Constant.
Constant attempted to rely on the distinction drawn in Quach c. Sotelo (Castellon) between an inaccurate declaration made in good faith and a truly “false” declaration, arguing that her error, if any, was an honest mistake. The court rejected this characterization. It found that Constant was not acting in good faith when she responded to the garnishment in January 2025 because she failed to disclose foreseeable payments to Joanis for his consulting role. When combined with the court’s broader doubts about the credibility of her and Joanis’s narrative, and the clear misalignment between SGA’s declarations and the actual business relationship, the judge determined that SGA had made a false declaration both about Joanis’s involvement in the company and about sums that could be payable to him.

Sanction under article 717 C.p.c. and outcome

Having concluded that SGA was (1) in default of declaring in the prescribed time and (2) had made a false declaration, the court proceeded to apply article 717 C.p.c. This provision authorizes the court to condemn a third-party garnishee to pay the creditor as if it were itself the debtor when the third party either fails to declare, fails to retain or deposit amounts, or makes a false declaration. The judge emphasized that these three grounds are disjunctive: proof of any one of them suffices to impose the sanction. Here, more than one ground was established.
The court therefore granted CPAS’s amended application for judgment against the third-party garnishee. It declared that SGA was in default of declaring and that it had made a false declaration, rejected SGA’s negative declaration, and condemned SGA, as third-party garnishee, to pay CPAS the amount owed by Joan Junior Joanis under the 2022 default judgment. Specifically, SGA was ordered to pay the principal sum of 31,560.17 $, with legal interest and the additional indemnity under article 1619 C.c.Q. from the various dates tied to each group of wage claims (from 27 November 2015 to 28 July 2017, depending on the set of claim numbers), together with court costs. The judgment does not compute a single global figure for interest and indemnity, so the total monetary amount beyond the 31,560.17 $ principal cannot be precisely quantified from the text alone. Nonetheless, the successful party is clearly the Comité paritaire des agents de sécurité, which obtained a full condemnation against SGA for the entire judgment debt of 31,560.17 $, plus unquantified interest, additional indemnity, and costs in its favour.