Quebec Prosecutors Strike for Higher Pay

Crown lawyers are demanding a 40 per cent salary increase.

If you’d like to commit a crime in Quebec, now might be the time to do it. All trials that aren’t already underway have been postponed indefinitely as the province's 450 prosecutors walked off the job in the first strike since the lawyers union won the legal right to strike in 2002. Trials for people already in custody will also go ahead. The prosecutors are seeking a 40 per cent pay raise to bring their wages in line with those of crown prosecutors in the rest of country, who make an average of 32 per cent more than their Quebec counterparts. The government says such an increase is simply impractical, but the lawyers’ union insists that stance is a political ruse.