Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Civil liability of the Quebec government is assessed under article 1457 C.c.Q. for negligent communication of misleading information to a third party without prior verification or consultation of the person concerned.
• The central evidentiary issue is whether forwarding an email containing a third party’s business address, in a context falsely suggesting involvement with the Ministry and an OBV’s “deliverables,” amounts to transmission of erroneous and harmful information.
• The court distinguishes between mere disclosure of a generic business email address and disclosure of that address within a misleading context that appears to link the consultant and his company to the Ministry’s dealings.
• Proof of pecuniary and reputational loss is found inadequate, as the claimant offers only his testimony and no documents or corroboration of lost mandates, reduced income, or diminished professional credibility.
• The jurisdictional limit of the Small Claims Division bars any consideration of alleged defamation by a non-party (the blogger), so the court cannot award damages based on the defamatory nature of social media posts.
• Moral (psychological) damages are awarded on a discretionary basis in a modest amount, reflecting both the Ministry’s negligence and the claimant’s own inaction when the original email was received.

Background and parties

Robin Dupuis is a shareholder and director of a company operating under the business name OIDIOD. His company provides consulting services in governance and organizational support to an “organisme de bassin versant” (OBV), an entity tasked with integrated water-resource management under Quebec’s water governance legislation. OIDIOD’s mandate concerns the internal governance and organization of the OBV’s board and management; it has no role in the OBV’s substantive projects and no relationship with the Ministry of the Environment, the Fight Against Climate Change, Wildlife and Parks (the “Ministry”). The defendant is the Procureur général du Québec, representing the Quebec government and, in this case, the Ministry. Dupuis brings a claim in the Small Claims Division of the Court of Québec, seeking $15,000 in damages for harm he says arose when the Ministry provided a third party with an email that misleadingly associated him and OIDIOD with the Ministry’s dealings with the OBV.

Events leading to the dispute

On 17 April 2023, a Ministry official, Philippe Gosselin, emailed the OBV’s director general, René Labrosse, to follow up on a proposed meeting concerning “les livrables” (deliverables), without further detail. Gosselin’s email was addressed only to Labrosse. Labrosse replied the same day to coordinate the proposed meeting and, in copying his response, placed project manager Grégory Wilson in copy and—without any clear explanation in the evidence—also copied an OIDIOD email address. The presence of the OIDIOD address would reasonably suggest to a reader that OIDIOD was involved in, or at least concerned by, the planned meeting or the subject matter of the “deliverables,” even though, in fact, neither OIDIOD nor Dupuis had any link with the Ministry or that meeting. No one, including Dupuis, reacted at that time to the inclusion of OIDIOD’s address in the email chain, and Dupuis took no steps then to inform the Ministry that his company was not involved and that its email should not appear on such correspondence.

Access to information request and online publications

In 2024, an individual named Philippe Boudreau submitted an access-to-information request to the Ministry concerning OIDIOD. In response, the Ministry provided, among other things, the 17 April 2023 email bearing OIDIOD’s address in copy. The Ministry did not notify or consult Dupuis or OIDIOD before releasing this email to Boudreau, nor did it inform him afterwards that the email had been disclosed. In July 2024, Boudreau published two posts on a social network attacking the OBV and its management. The posts referred to Ministry funding to the OBV and questioned where the money had gone, alluding to the director general’s entourage, including a “certain merle des arts visuels” and, later, directly tying a “merle” (a mocking play on the name “Robin”) to a supposed conflict of interest. In the second, more detailed post, Boudreau described months of investigation, the use of access-to-information requests, the discovery of an unusual email address linked to the OBV, and the eventual identification of OIDIOD and Dupuis through that address and subsequent searches. He suggested that the OBV’s director general had called on one of his own clients (Dupuis/OIDIOD) in a way that did not align with the OBV’s mission and that this consultant sometimes responded to third parties in place of the director general, framing the situation as a conflict of interest. That second post included an internal Ministry email from February 2024 in which a Ministry official confirmed finding a single email involving the OIDIOD address—namely, the 17 April 2023 email, accessible via hyperlink. Thus, the access-to-information disclosure became the factual bridge by which Boudreau connected OIDIOD and Dupuis with the OBV’s management and suggested impropriety. Dupuis only learned of the social media posts in November 2024. He promptly complained to the Ministry about the disclosure of the 17 April 2023 email without his consultation, but the Ministry’s written responses in early December 2024 essentially took the position that only a general business address was disclosed, that such information was public in nature, and that there was therefore no need to notify a third party.

Legal framework and issues

There is no contractual relationship between the Ministry and either OIDIOD or Dupuis. The court therefore applies the general civil liability rule under article 1457 of the Civil Code of Québec, which imposes on “toute personne” a duty to adhere to the rules of conduct that circumstances, usage, or law require, so as not to cause harm to others and to repair any bodily, moral, or material damage caused by fault. The key legal question is whether, in responding to Boudreau’s access-to-information request, the Ministry breached this duty toward Dupuis and OIDIOD by failing to act as a prudent and diligent person would have in handling an email that, although containing only a business address, came from a third-party OBV director and, in context, appeared to associate OIDIOD with the Ministry’s dealings and with “deliverables” to be discussed. The court notes that the email address itself is not intrinsically confidential; however, it is embedded in a particular context created by a non-Ministry actor. The Ministry did not obtain the address from Dupuis or OIDIOD, nor did it have any record of consent by them to be included in those exchanges. A related issue is whether the Ministry should have anticipated potential harm from releasing the email in that context and whether it should have sought Dupuis’s views before disclosure. A separate, procedural limitation also arises from article 537 of the Code of Civil Procedure, which excludes defamation claims from the small-claims procedure. This prevents the court from assessing or compensating any alleged defamation in Boudreau’s posts; Boudreau is not a party, and the court explicitly refrains from deciding whether his texts are defamatory.

Court’s analysis of fault and causation

The court finds that, upon receiving Boudreau’s request, the Ministry had a duty to act prudently and diligently toward Dupuis and OIDIOD. Because the OIDIOD address appeared in the 17 April 2023 email solely due to Labrosse’s action, and not by any initiative of Dupuis or his company, the Ministry was confronted with third-party information placed in a context that it did not control. Reasonable diligence required the Ministry to consider the possible consequences of releasing this email, which, on its face, gave the impression that OIDIOD was somehow concerned or involved in a Ministry–OBV meeting regarding “deliverables.” The court concludes that the Ministry did not undertake the necessary verification. It forwarded the email to Boudreau without contacting Dupuis or OIDIOD and without probing the implications of releasing a document that could erroneously link the company to the Ministry’s work and funding relationship with the OBV. That failure constitutes negligence: the Ministry communicated misleading information—namely, a document that falsely suggested OIDIOD’s involvement—to a third party without offering the company an opportunity to explain or object. The judge stresses that the problem lies not in the mere disclosure of a generic email address, but in communicating that address within a misleading context to a third party, enabling that party to use it to build a narrative about conflicts of interest involving Dupuis. Although the court does not impute to the Ministry any intention to harm or any ability to foresee precisely the later online posts, it finds that the Ministry’s lack of prior verification made those posts possible and therefore engages the liability of the Attorney General for the prejudicial consequences that flowed from its act. At the same time, the court considers Dupuis’s own conduct: when he originally received the 17 April 2023 email, he did nothing to correct the false impression or request removal of OIDIOD’s address from the Ministry–OBV correspondence. This inaction is taken into account when assessing the extent of compensable harm.

Assessment of damages and limits of the claim

Dupuis claimed a total of $15,000, broken down as $5,000 for psychological damages (stress and mental health impacts), $5,000 for financial loss (lost mandates and income from the OBV), and $5,000 for reputational damage (harm to professional credibility and future collaborations. The evidentiary support for the financial and reputational heads of claim is limited to his oral testimony; no documents, records of lost contracts, or other corroboration were filed to show that OIDIOD actually lost assignments or that professional credibility was tangibly diminished as a consequence of the disclosure. On this record, the court holds that it cannot award the requested amounts for financial and reputational damages. On psychological harm, the court accepts that Dupuis experienced stress and vulnerability, particularly because he felt harassed following Boudreau’s publications and because he perceived that subsequent communications with the Ministry were systematically subject to access-to-information requests, increasing his anxiety. He produced at least one example of such a request from spring 2025. Still, given the limited and imprecise nature of the evidence, the court exercises its discretion to fix moral damages at a modest level. It also weighs the fact that Dupuis failed to act when he first received the problematic email, a factor that tempers the global assessment of harm. In light of the small-claims rules, the court further underscores that it is not entitled to consider or compensate any alleged defamation by Boudreau; thus, the decision confines itself strictly to the consequences of the Ministry’s negligent disclosure, not to the content or lawfulness of the social media posts themselves.

Ruling and outcome

In the result, the Court of Québec, Small Claims Division, partially grants Dupuis’s claim. It finds that the Ministry, through its handling of Boudreau’s access-to-information request, committed a fault under article 1457 C.c.Q. by disclosing an email that misleadingly associated OIDIOD with the Ministry’s dealings and a planned meeting with the OBV, without prior verification or consultation. However, because of the thin evidentiary foundation for economic and reputational loss, the court limits compensation to moral (psychological) damages, which it fixes at $1,000. Accordingly, the Procureur général du Québec is condemned to pay Dupuis $1,000, together with legal interest and the additional indemnity from the date of service, plus court costs. While the principal award is clearly quantified, the exact overall monetary total (including accruing interest and indemnity) cannot be determined from the judgment alone, but it is clear that Dupuis emerges as the successful party with a limited yet concrete monetary recovery and his judicial costs.