Quebec’s Court of Appeal has overturned the sentence of house arrest ordered for former Outremont mayor Stéphane Harbour and instead reduced his punishment to a conditional discharge along with a one-year probation.
Harbour pleaded guilty in 2015 of conspiring with the help of staffers to submit bills from 2005 to 2007 in order to be reimbursed for English lessons totalling $1,870.34, as well as for two meals that should not have been covered by the borough. Harbour was forced to resign in 2007 over allegations of improper spending practices. He subsequently repaid the money for the lessons and meals, and pled guilty, receiving a six-month conditional prison sentence and one year’s probation.
In their ruling, the Appeals Court judges found Quebec Court Judge Louise Villemure was overly punitive given the relatively small amounts of money involved. Villemure, the judges wrote, based her decision to sentence Harbour to a conditional prison sentence on jurisprudence relating to cases involving abuses of confidence that involved far higher sums of money. At the same time, the judges noted, the impact of the humiliation Harbour suffered as a result of the media coverage that resulted in Harbour being unable to hold subsequent jobs also had to taken into account.
