First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
The Quebec government has rejected a package of race-based federal funding, declaring that they don’t accept the notion of “systemic racism” underlying it.
Starting in 2021, the government of then prime minister Justin Trudeau earmarked $6.64 million for a new federal program for Impact of Race and Culture Assessments. These were reports designed to secure lighter sentences for Black criminals in order to counteract “systemic racism in the criminal justice system,” as a federal backgrounder put it.
But Quebec’s justice department has consistently sent back its share of the funding, and told The Canadian Press in an email this week that “Quebec doesn’t subscribe to the approach on which the funding program is based, namely systemic racism.”
Since at least 2020, the Government of Canada has repeatedly endorsed the idea that the country’s institutions are all fundamentally racist.
Although discriminatory codes haven’t been a feature of Canadian law for decades, “systemic racism” is premised on the idea that any inequality of outcome is itself evidence of racism.
If the racial mix of any group does not match the racial mix of the wider population, this is inferred as the consequence of embedded discrimination.
As Canada’s official “anti-racism lexicon” puts it, systemic racism exists in the form of practices that “appear neutral on the surface but, nevertheless, have an exclusionary impact on racialized persons.”
The concept of systemic racism has been using to justify everything from race-based hiring quotas to federal grants that are available only for “equity-deserving” races.
But the notion has been particularly embraced by the Department of Justice, where any racial overrepresentation among offenders has been framed as the direct result of racist courts and racist law enforcement.
“Systemic racism in the criminal justice system has resulted in the overincarceration of Indigenous peoples, Black Canadians and members of marginalized communities,” the Department of Justice declared in 2021, before vowing to “root out systemic racism.”
Quebec, however, has proved the most consistent holdout to the notion that their governing structures are self-evidently racist.
In 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests roiling both U.S. and Canadian cities, Quebec Premier François Legault was one of the only Canadian political leaders to avoid issuing a statement declaring himself to be the head of a government shot through with “systemic racism.”
“I don’t understand why people are trying to stick on one word. I think what is important is to say and all agree that there is some racism in Quebec, and we don’t want that anymore,” he said at the time.
Compare that with Legault’s Ontario counterpart, Doug Ford. In 2020, Ford told the Ontario Legislative Assembly “of course there’s systemic racism in Ontario … there’s systemic racism across this country.”
Legault would reject the systemic racism label again in 2021, following the release of a coroner’s investigation into the failure of Quebec’s child protection services to prevent the death of a seven-year-old girl, Géhane Kamel, at the hands of her stepmother.
Since Kamel was Indigenous, the report included a call for the Quebec government to declare itself guilty of systemic racism.
But Legault refused, even brandishing a Le Petit Robert dictionary at a press conference to read out the definition of “systemic.”
“Le Petit Robert defines ‘systemic’ as: ‘relative to a system in its entirety,’” Legault said in French. “For me, a system is something that comes from above…. Is there something from on high that is communicated everywhere in the health system that says: ‘Be discriminatory in your treatment of Indigenous people’? It’s evident for me, the answer is no.”
At the federal level, the Bloc Québécois has similarly been among the most vocal opponents of an ongoing federal push to normalize the idea that the workings of Canadian governments are clandestinely racist.
In leaders’ debates for the 2021 federal election, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said the term systemic racism had been employed as a club against Quebec. “It became this white society against this other white society. The words became toxic,” he said.
Impact of Race and Culture Assessments (IRCAs) were part of a broad package of federal programs launched in 2021 with the aim of “rooting out systemic racism” across the Canadian federal government.
Among other “anti-racism” plans pursued at the same time as IRCAs was a Trudeau government proposal to end mandatory sentencing for a host of gun crimes on the premise that offenders convicted of the crimes were disproportionately Black and Indigenous. This included “robbery with a firearm,” “discharging firearm with intent” and “weapons trafficking.”
IRCAs are modelled on Gladue reports, a longtime feature of the Canadian court system in which judges must sentence Indigenous offenders only after reading a commissioned report detailing the “systemic or background factors” that may have influenced the crime.
This can include everything from a past ADHD diagnosis, to whether parents or extended relatives had attended an Indian Residential School.
IRCAs simply aimed to extend Gladue sentencing rules to other non-white criminals. As a policy document explained, “IRCAs inform sentencing judges of the disadvantages and systemic racism faced by Black and other racialized Canadians and may recommend alternatives to incarceration and/or culturally appropriate accountability measures within a sentence of incarceration.”
Although Quebec has refused funding for IRCAs, it was just last month that an IRCA reportedly first featured in a Quebec sentencing decision.
Convicted drug trafficker Frank Paris had been facing a 35-month sentence, but Quebec Court Judge Magali Lepage reduced this to 24 months on the basis of an IRCA that, among other things, stated that Paris “ended up getting involved in selling drugs” because he struggled with high school French.
At the time, Quebec’s minister against racism, Christopher Skeete, said he had “concern and worry” over the decision.
“If we live in a society where people are judged by their skin colour, I’m not sure that’s a way forward for us to fight racism,” he told CBC.
IN OTHER NEWS
U.S. politicians keep issuing letters blaming Canada for the fact that its forests are catching fire. A group of seven Michigan lawmakers as well as one federal Congressman, all Republicans,
have recently issued statements
demanding that Canada deal with the wildfire smoke now plaguing many border states. “Instead of enjoying family vacations at Michigan’s beautiful lakes and campgrounds … Michiganders are forced to breathe hazardous air as a result of Canada’s failure to prevent and control wildfires,” read one.
Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter.
