The province of New Brunswick is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a doctor who says he faced a barrage of racist abuse after he was accused of breaking COVID-19 rules.
The Office of the Attorney General filed a motion on June 28 with the Court of Queen’s Bench asking for the suit filed in January by Dr. Jean Robert Ngola to be “struck out entirely” for failing to make a reasonable case against the province.
The motion says the suit’s 61-page statement of claim is repetitive, unnecessarily complicated and “an abuse of the process of the court.”
Ngola was working as a family doctor in Campellton, N.B., in May 2020 when he was accused of violating the province’s Emergency Measures Act amid a growing COVID-19 outbreak.
The Crown later withdrew the charge after concluding there was no chance of conviction.
Ngola’s suit names the province, the RCMP and Facebook’s owner, Meta, as defendants.
His suit alleges, among other things, that Premier Blaine Higgs should have known the doctor would face abuse when the premier referred to an “irresponsible” health-care worker during a news conference in 2020 and said the matter was being handled by the RCMP.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 8, 2022.
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