Canadian Lawyer

28 N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m u Chan Khuong is one tough cookie. Three days and 21 inter- views after her resignation from the top job at the Quebec Bar, she breezed in for interview No. 22 over lunch on the terrace of an upscale Quebec City restaurant looking fit, poised, and radiant. The resignation was a surprise move that put an end to a summer-long public and legal drama that dominated news headlines and divided lawyers in la belle province like never before. "Call me Lu, everyone does," said Khuong (pronounced kwong), flashing the wide smile that Quebeckers have grown accustomed to seeing in recent months as she fought to keep her job and defend her dignity. Khuong takes a sip of white wine, smiles, and begins fielding questions about her summer from hell. It had all started so promisingly. On May 22, Khuong became the first elected bâtonnière in the 166-year history of the Barreau du Quebec. She won nearly 63 per cent of the more than 10,000 votes that were cast electronically after a long and hotly contested campaign in which she promised to bring radical reforms to the staid law society. When she officially took office on June 11, the Cambodian-born Khuong also became the first person of colour to lead the 25,000-member professional order. She was also the first woman to break a major colour barrier in the Quebec legal profession since 1999, when Superior Court Judge Guylène Beaugé was elected president of the Quebec division of the Canadian Bar Association. "I start my mandate with pride and determination," Khuong said at her swearing-in ceremony at the bar's annual congress in La Malbaie. "I'm conscious of the hon- our that has been bestowed on me." Just 20 days later, however, Khuong's storybook ascension suddenly nosedived. On July 1, La Presse reported that she had been arrested a year earlier for shoplifting two pairs of designer jeans worth $450 from the Laval store of the Simons fashion retail chain. After initially denying the incident when first contacted by a La Presse reporter on June 30, Khuong called back later in the day to confirm it. She said she'd been caught off guard by the question because the matter had been dealt with non-judicially under a confidential Quebec diversion program for dealing with minor Criminal Code offences by adults who do not have a significant criminal history. Under the rules of the program, which has reportedly been used in 100,000 cases since coming into effect in 1994, a Quebec Crown prosecutor has discretionary power to deal with cases non- judicially to avoid stigmatizing offenders who are unlikely to re-offend. When a decision not to prosecute is made, records of alleged infractions are maintained for five years in a registry that is available only to prosecutors, and it can be invoked only if a person is charged with another offence within five years. After that, the slate is wiped clean. Distracted Khuong blamed the incident on a moment of distraction and inattention. "I never did anything wrong and I never acknowledged or admitted that I did," she said. In a nine-page sworn and unsolicited statement dated May 27, 2014 that Khuong sent to Laval police and was leaked to La Presse, Khuong said she went to the Carrefour Laval shopping mall on April 17, 2014 on an overnight birthday shopping trip for her 13-year-old daughter and two friends. According to Khuong, she entered the Simons store carrying a handbag and an overnight bag. The latter contained three pairs of black jeans that she had pur- chased a few days earlier for $9.99 each at one of the chain's stores in Quebec City. "They were for my sister, who lives in Montreal," said Khuong. "I called her [and] said, 'Come and meet us at the mall and you can try them on. If they don't fit, we'll exchange them at the Simons store there.'" As the three girls wandered around the mall, Khuong did some shopping while she waited for her sister. She tried on several items of clothing, including a bra, some blouses, and two pairs of black jeans worth $235 each that were similar to the ones from Quebec City. Khuong said she took the $9.99 jeans out of her bag in the changing room to check the size, and took a phone call as she packed up her belongings and the items she intended to buy. "I must have mistakenly inversed the jeans then," she said. "I never look at the price tag on clothes, only the size." At the cash register, she said she was watching her cellphone in case the girls called and keeping an eye out for her sister, and didn't notice she had paid for the cheaper jeans. When Laval police arrived an hour later, Khoung told them it was a mistake, and she would never steal from Simons because she was a family friend of the store's owner, Quebec City businessman Peter Simons. "They verified my identification [and] told me I was eligible for this non- judicial program, which I had never heard of," said Khuong. "They explained it to me, gave me a file number and a number to call, and let me go and rejoin my family." After sending an unsolicited statement of her version of events to Laval police, Khuong said she didn't hear anything back until June 2014, the same month she was sworn in as the barreau's vice president (in charge of finances). It came in the form of a letter from the prosecutor's office in Laval, informing that court proceedings would not be brought against her unless she gave notice to the con- trary. When asked why she didn't take the matter to court, Khuong, who is the wife and legal partner of former provincial justice min- ister and firebrand victims' defence lawyer Marc Bellemare, told Canadian Lawyer essentially the same thing she told La Presse: "I wanted to avoid the media coverage, losing my time in court, and avoiding the whole process. It would have been a circus." When asked why she didn't tell a barreau official about the inci- dent, Khuong smiled wryly. "You don't know the bar," she said. "I have no regrets. I did nothing wrong." Suspended She repeated those same arguments to the 11 members of the bar's 16-member board of directors who attended an emergency meet- ing in Montreal on June 30 to deal with the looming crisis. "We learned about her arrest from the journalist who called looking for comment," said Louis-François Asselin, one of the 12 newly elected board members and one of two vice presidents. "We asked [Khuong] about it and she told us some unbelievable version of events. We were shocked because she had never told us anything about it." When the meeting adjourned two hours later, Khuong returned home to Quebec City. When the story broke the next morning, the board members met again without her in Montreal. At around 11 L

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