Law Students’ Work on Planned Obsolescence Legislation Leads to Government Bill in Quebec

“We were really able to have an impact, our work was relevant, and it’s very rewarding and encouraging to see that. It rallies everyone, and that’s what we saw from the start of the project,” says Jade Racine.

She is one of the former students who took part in this “colossal” work as part of a law degree course at the Université de Sherbrooke.

“We absolutely did not expect it to take on this proportion when we started it in the classroom,” adds another ex-student, Guillaume Bourbeau, laughing.

In 2019, their lecturer, Jonathan Mayer, challenged his cohort of 51 students: to write a bill to fight against planned obsolescence, i.e. the voluntary reduction in the lifespan of objects by manufacturers, and the impossibility or great difficulty of repairing them.

The challenge was met, and Bill 197 on planned obsolescence was tabled in the National Assembly in April 2019 by independent MP Guy Ouellette. The idea was later taken up in the current legislature by Liberal MP Marwah Rizqy.

Inspiration

But, icing on the cake, the 1^is June, the Minister of Justice, Simon Jolin-Barrette, tabled his own version of the bill, with the firm intention of adopting it, and underlined the “serious work” of the students.

“Several have launched themselves, have made proposals, certainly giving rise to good avenues of reflection,” said Minister Jolin-Barrette. I am thinking here, in particular, of the students from the University of Sherbrooke who contributed to the drafting of a very first bill on planned obsolescence which was tabled here in the National Assembly. »

The Minister wants to put a spoke in the wheels of manufacturers tempted to offer lower quality products in order to ensure that consumers are forced to renew them prematurely by reversing the burden that is currently on buyers, with the principle of legal warranty.

Mr. Mayer welcomes this “innovative pedagogical approach”, and is very happy to see that “students can have repercussions other than strictly academic”. He says he is very proud to realize that their initiative “contributed to changing a little the law of consumer protection in Quebec”.

The right tools

Jade Racine and Guillaume Bourbeau also emphasize that their pride in seeing that the “path” they took to draft their bill was the right one: the baccalaureate students – without the help of Mr. Mayer, who claims not to have touched the content of the bill – suggested a modification to the Consumer Protection Act rather than the creation of a new law, and insisted on the right to reparation.

Jade Racine adds. “We had even met repairers, people in the field of cell phones. They explained to us that they are not even able to open certain cell phones. Sometimes just opening the machine breaks it, so it’s just impossible to fix. Or sometimes the tools don’t exist, you can’t buy them. It was really problematic,” she says.

The Legault government bill provides that “anyone who wants to repair an object can do so with common, accessible tools and without having taken an engineering course”. The students had also realized in their research that “it’s easier to legislate on the right to repair than to penalize planned obsolescence, which is difficult to prove,” says Ms.^me Racine.

Another vision of law

This adventure also allowed the lawyers Bourbeau and Racine to better understand “the social source” of the laws. “It gave me a new perspective. When I look at an article of law, I tell myself that it comes from an idea, from a need that we had in society to come and protect people. It is because of this project that I have a completely different vision to fully understand where the laws come from, and to understand the political aspect of them”, underlines Mr.^me Racine, who now works in business law.

This comment makes Mr. Mayer, a law graduate who holds a master’s degree in ethics and philosophy, smile.

And Mr. Mayer does not intend to stop there. A cohort of students is currently working on artificial intelligence and its many challenges. “The legal impacts are immense. If we are able to produce videos for which we are no longer able to distinguish the real from the fake, how can we admit the video evidence in court? And if a professional like a civil engineer receives help from AI to do their calculations and there is a problem, who is responsible? Him or the AI ​​designer? There is a panoply of legal questions that will arise, ”he drops. We wish them good luck.