Supreme Court rejects Normand Dubé appeal over 16-year sentence
The Supreme Court of Canada rejected normand dubé’s request to appeal his consecutive prison sentences on Thursday, leaving his 16-year penitentiary term in place. The ruling keeps intact sentences tied to arson, threats against public servants and a Hydro-Québec power outage caused by his airplane.
Dubé, known as “le pilote des stars,” had already been sentenced in 2018 to seven years in prison for three counts of mischief against Hydro-Québec. A year later, he received nine years in penitentiary for harassing three public servants and having their residences set on fire.
Dubé and the Hydro-Québec outage
The case began with a power outage in December 2014 after high-voltage lines were targeted using an airplane he owned and a method a court order forbids from being disclosed. More than 180,000 homes lost electricity in the middle of winter, and some customers went without power for up to two days in Montreal, Montérégie, Laurentides, Centre-du-Québec and Outaouais.
Hydro-Québec said the sabotage cost $28.6 million and also caused repercussions in Ontario and the United States. That outage remains the core of the mischief convictions that fed into the longer sentence structure later upheld by appellate judges.
Appeal rejected by the Court of Appeal
In 2021, the Court of Appeal sided with Crown prosecutors and changed the sentences from concurrent to consecutive, bringing the total to 16 years. Dubé has always contested the facts, the verdicts and the sentences imposed on him.
He also failed to win release in December last year from the Parole Board of Canada, and the Court of Appeal refused him release on April 26. His sentence is set to expire in 2036, with day parole eligibility in 2031.
Dubé sentence runs to 2036
The Supreme Court’s refusal means Dubé’s 16-year sentence remains the governing term for now. For him, the immediate result is that the longer penalty imposed after the Court of Appeal decision stays in place, along with the 2031 day parole date and the 2036 end date already on the books.
