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Close-up on racism in Quebec: 'I lost part of my life'

As the province prepares to hold a watered-down forum on anti-discrimination, three Quebecers share their painful stories

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Launched in July 2017, Quebec’s on-again off-again commission on systemic racism and discrimination was a political minefield from the outset.

Too much talk, not enough action, said the Parti Québécois, before accusing the Liberal government of Quebec bashing.

The commission would put Quebecers on trial, echoed the Coalition Avenir Québec. 

Quebecers have grown tired of “systemic contempt,” said La Meute — the far-right group that staged a protest in Quebec City last weekend.

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The Liberals promptly folded and changed the title, turning the commission into more of a feel-good forum on the value of diversity, with a job fair thrown in for good measure.

Lost in the makeover were the voices that have long clamoured for a microphone to talk about their experiences with systemic discrimination and how to fix the system.

It’s not clear what will happen at the day-long forum Dec. 5, hosted by new Immigration Minister David Heurtel at the ferry terminal in Quebec City.

Systemic racism is not always easy to define. 

According to the Mayor’s Committee on Community and Race Relations in Toronto, systemic racism “includes the policies and practices entrenched in established institutions (schools, workplaces and government agencies) which result in the exclusion or promotion of designated groups. It differs from overt discrimination in that no individual intent is necessary.”

It’s not difficult to find examples, however. 

Here are three people who say they faced systemic racism in their dealings with police, employers and the school system in Montreal. 

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He fought the city for his place in the sun

In 1986, Jean-Olthène Tanisma started working at Montreal’s urban planning department. Twenty years later, he sued the city and the Human Rights Commission for engaging in systemic racism.
In 1986, Jean-Olthène Tanisma started working at Montreal’s urban planning department. Twenty years later, he sued the city and the Human Rights Commission for engaging in systemic racism. Photo by Peter McCabe /MONTREAL GAZETTE

Jean-Olthène Tanisma, thinks back to the days, three decades before any of this, when he played professional soccer in Haiti.

It was the teamwork, he recalls, the sense that they were all working toward the same goal. That’s what gave him the determination and mental fortitude to keep fighting. 

Tanisma was never stranded for weeks or trapped under a collapsed building, though he came close. He landed in Port-au-Prince two hours before the devastating earthquake of 2010, but drove past his old stadium on his way out of town before the Earth began to shake. 

No, it was more of a man-made disaster he endured — a lonely, epic battle against the city of Montreal that cost him more than $150,000 and 10 years of his life. 

In 2006, he sued the city of Montreal, along with the Human Rights Commission, for engaging in systemic racism — for not promoting him to a management position because of his race or ethnicity.

In the end, Tanisma won. Or did he? He’s not so sure. 

***

Back in Haiti, at the height of his soccer career, Tanisma met his wife, a franco-Ontarian whose parents had opened the first Canadian restaurant in Port-au-Prince. So when it came time to choose where to continue his studies — Nantes, Puebla or Montreal — the choice was clear. 

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“I knew about the Quebec reality,” Tanisma says from his home in Dorval. “I had contacts with Canadian development workers and others I played soccer with. So I knew I could integrate.”

Tanisma did his bachelor of arts at Université du Québec à Montréal, then a master’s degree in urban planning at Université de Montreal. His thesis was a plan to revitalize Victoria Ave. for the Jewish and other communities  in the neighbourhood. 

That in turn helped open doors for him at the city of Montreal, and in 1986 he started working in the urban planning department. 

But the door was open only so wide. 

Tanisma remained on contract with the city for three years. At one point he won first prize in a French-language contest run by the administration, for a text he wrote on the jazz festival. Having studied Greek and Latin in Haiti, French prose came easily. But unlike the other winners, no one came to take his photograph and publish it in a magazine. 

A few months later, when he applied to become a permanent employee of the city, he was told he had failed the French test. Flabbergasted, he wrote to then mayor Jean Doré, who convened a committee to review his test. It turned out Tanisma had been faulted 21 times for not barring his “t”s properly and for “I”s that looked like “l”s.  Tanisma was hired.

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“Back then, there was a reticence to accept those of us who were different,” Tanisma says. “I’m not saying everyone was racist, but there were bureaucrats and a system that wouldn’t give us visibility for our work.”  

His real problems, however, began when after 14 years at the same job, Tanisma applied for a management position. It was 2002, right after the municipal mergers, and four positions had opened up.

He applied to all four but didn’t even get an interview. Only those who held management positions before the merger could apply, he was told. 

The four positions were filled, however, by Tanisma’s colleagues. All were “professional class” like him. None had been managers before the merger. All were white. 

“I had the competence and I was a team player. We drank beers together, I told jokes. … The four who were hired were Québécois. They were also professionals like me, with the same education. When I asked why I was treated differently there was no answer. For me it was obvious. It was discrimination.”

Tanisma took his case to the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal. It would take them three years to conclude there was evidence to back up the allegations of systemic racism by the city, but they had still not brought the case before the tribunal. (The HRT has in fact never heard a case of systemic racism since it was founded in 1990.)

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Tired of waiting, Tanisma went to Quebec Superior Court in 2006 to sue both the city and the HRC. He hired two lawyers and fought the city as it argued for two years that the court had no jurisdiction. In 2008, the Supreme Court finally ruled the Superior Court was the right forum for the case.

In 2013, Justice Mark Peacock ruled in Tanisma’s favour — he was a victim of systemic racism by the city. 

Tanisma should be given all the training necessary for a management position as well as access to the opportunities, Peacock ruled. He ordered the city to pay Tanisma $30,000 plus interest (about $42,000 in total).

By then Tanisma had paid out $159,000 in legal fees. He had spent the last seven years systematically ostracized by his superiors at work. He’s been on sick leave ever since. 

***

Forty years after setting foot in Montreal, Tanisma marvels at how his “terre d’accueil” has evolved.

He was watching television the other day, he says — one out of five Montrealers is born outside the country! 

“Montreal welcomed me, Quebec opened its arms to me. There is no ghetto here. I feel good here. But what I achieved should be recognized as well. I gave Montreal and Quebec back what I received.”

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There are four universities in Montreal — two of them his alma maters — and eight CEGEPs, he remarks. 

“We have an incredible pool of knowledge here. We shouldn’t be wasting it because of racism and discrimination.”

His own energy would have been wasted, he said, if he hadn’t been so stubborn. After suing the city, Tanisma says he was not given any meaningful work as he continued to show up at the urban planning department.

“They challenged me to do nothing,” he says.

Instead, he began working on how to develop the city infrastructure for electric cars, research he says has paved the way for the city and the province’s electric car strategies, now being implemented. 

But what of all the others, who won’t fight for 10 years for their place in the sun? “How many are relegated to driving taxi cabs and working in factories?” he wonders.

The problem is with institutions and people in power who refuse to change, Tanisma says. 

While visible minorities make up 11 per cent of the population in Quebec — and 30 per cent in Montreal — only 38 out of 6,000 employees of the Société des alcools du Québec (0.6 per cent) are from visible minorities, as are 312 out of 20,000 employees at Hydro-Québec (1.5 per cent).

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As of December 2015, visible minorities made up 12 per cent of the city’s workforce and 6 per cent of its senior managers.

Tanisma says the government must to take drastic measures to correct the problem of systemic racism — just as it did to fight organized crime and corruption. 

“I lost a part of my life in fighting the city, and what did I get for it?” Tanisma asks. “I have been a professional for 28 years and I have never been promoted.”

‘Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?’

When she went to police to report that a pick-up had tried to run her over, Khadija says, it became clear they did not want to pursue the matter.
When she went to police to report that a pick-up had tried to run her over, Khadija says, it became clear they did not want to pursue the matter. Photo by Christinne Muschi /MONTREAL GAZETTE

Khadija was crossing the street in Old Montreal, as she does every morning on her way to work, a stone’s throw from city hall. Only on this spring day, as she reached the centre of the intersection, a man in a white Dodge Ram suddenly pressed on the gas and came barrelling toward her.

She had turned her head to look right at him. He was bald, 40-ish and thickset. He was just a few feet away. She dove to the ground, just in time. 

The pick-up came to a stop at a red light down the street. Khadija ran to take a picture of the licence plate. But she was crying so hard and her hands were shaking so badly that she only captured a blurry shot of the asphalt. 

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Then she ran to a police car parked in front of city hall and told the officers what happened. The man tried to run me over, cried Khadija, an architect at a nearby firm. That’s him in the Ram, she said, pointing down the street.

Khadijah says the police woman responded: “OK don’t worry, we’ll look into it,” before driving off in the opposite direction. She never saw them again.

But this was just a preview of the treatment she would get from the police as she tried to file a complaint against the man she says tried to kill her. 

***

Khadija was trying to calm herself down when a young man came up to her and said he had witnessed everything. That guy was crazy, he told her. He had the licence plate number and would testify in court if she wanted. He gave her his number. 

But even that didn’t seem to help when she again tried to get police to investigate the incident in the spring of 2016. 

Later that day, Khadija went to her neighbourhood police station in St-Laurent.

She explained what had happened to the officer on duty, sobbing as she recounted the details. But she says the officer acted as if she was just whining, playing the victim, making a big deal out of nothing.

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She says he told her: “Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he didn’t see you. Are you sure you want to file a complaint?” 

At least, at that point, a superior came over and told the officer he had to take her more seriously.

“The number of times I get looks or insults or middle fingers or people spit at me — I’ve become immune to it,” says Khadija, who usually dresses in bright, fashionable clothing and wears a hijab over her hair. She didn’t want her last name published, for fear of receiving more abuse online.

“Before, if someone spit at me, I would go home and cry. It would make me so depressed. Then it became just a daily thing.” 

In the six years since she moved from Morocco to Montreal with her husband, who had attended university here, she’s been a target of abuse so many times it doesn’t faze her anymore. 

“There’s always something. Once a guy on a bike rode by me and raised his arm at me and said, “Tasse-toi grosse musulmane!” (“Get out of the way, fat Muslim.”)

But this was the first time she was almost killed. 

In the days following Khadija’s visit to the police station, a police woman called her to follow up. She says she told her, “You know, if you press charges, it can take a long time. If you go to court, it could take two or three years. Do you really want to do this? Maybe it was an accident.” 

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She had a calm, down-to-earth voice. She was talking to Khadija like a friend. Are you sure you want to do this? she kept asking.

“She wanted to convince me to drop it,” Khadija says. “I was angry. So I said, ‘I want to press charges so the man will be arrested and know that he did something wrong.'” 

*** 

Khadija describes herself as a happy person.

“Even in the worst moments of my life I find a way to smile,” she says. 

Even while describing how she was almost killed and how the police didn’t seem to care, she is still making jokes. 

But she’s getting tired, she says. 

“In the beginning I wanted this man to know that there’s the law and there’s authority. That he couldn’t get away with this. But then you see the attitude of police who are supposed to protect you. I thought we were safe and secure, and in the end I realize I have to protect myself.”

Khadija received a second call from the friendly police woman, but she was busy at work and couldn’t take the call. The police woman left a message telling Khadija she had three days to call her back or her file (and the complaint) would be closed automatically. 

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Khadija called her back three times, always leaving a message, but the police woman could never be reached.  

Khadija and her husband are planning to move away now, either to Calgary or back to Morocco. Someplace safe to live with their three-year-old daughter. 

“After what happened, I realized I can’t live like this. My life was in danger. My husband feels the same way. This is a safe city, but not for everyone.”

Inuit and invisible in school

“Do you live in an igloo?”

It was the kind of question Olivia Lya Thomassie would be asked on a regular basis when she first arrived in Montreal from Kangirsuk in Ungava Bay.

She was only eight, a shy girl forced to move 1,600 kilometres due south to live with her father in Rosemont after the death of her mother.

At home in Kangirsuk, Olivia had witnessed her mother being murdered by her boyfriend. Two years later she would go back north to testify and see him jailed for life. 

But whisked off to Montreal that terrible week in 2006, speaking only Inuktitut, Olivia was placed in a classe d’accueil — welcome class — as if she, too, had come from a faraway country.

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Out of the mouths of children, the igloo question was taken in stride. But as the children grew into adolescents, and the stereotype of the Inuit morphed into the lazy drug addict/alcoholic, Olivia began to see a pattern.

While she was bending to southern Quebec culture, her classmates were learning nothing about the North and Indigenous Peoples today that would put the image of the lazy Eskimo to rest.

***

One day at her private Montreal high school for girls, a day-long event was devoted to learning about First Nations in Canada. One day was better than none, Olivia thought.

By the time she reached CEGEP, however, she could see what 11 years of schooling — minus a day — had achieved.

A teacher spoke of the “primitive” or “prehistoric” peoples of Quebec, flashing 200-year-old images of Indigenous Peoples on the screen. Another introduced a section on “Eskimo” art. Olivia told her the appropriate term was Inuit art but the teacher disagreed. 

Only Nanook of the North — the 1922 documentary shown to her cinema class — was presented as a product of the time, and prefaced with a comment that it does not represent the modern-day reality of the Inuit.

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“Already I found it difficult to believe what the teachers were teaching about geography and history, when everything they said about First Nations wasn’t true. If they didn’t tell the truth about Inuit, what else were they wrong about?”

She enrolled in a program at CÉGEP du Vieux Montréal called Arts, lettres et communication.

“They should have added ‘par et pour les québécois,’ ” Olivia says now. “It aggravates me because the whole education system is done just for white, francophone students. Everything is meant for them. I had a course on language and society. It said joual is the spoken language in Quebec without mentioning anything about Inuit or Indigenous languages. As if we don’t exist.”

***

In December 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — established to respond to the abuse of Indigenous children in residential schools — issued its findings. 

Olivia was in Grade 10.

Among the 94 calls to action: that the government of Canada, “in consultation and collaboration with Aboriginal Peoples and educators,” develop an age-appropriate curriculum for kindergarten to Grade 12 students on residential schools, treaties and the historical and contemporary contributions of Aboriginal Peoples.

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Since then, efforts to reform the Quebec high school history curriculum have been at the mercy of politics.

The latest version of the history curriculum, whose reform was begun by the Parti Québécois and finished and implemented by the current Liberal government, includes some information on residential schools and treaties, but says nothing about some of the events that form the context for the social and economic conditions of First Nations today.

Among other things, the curriculum does not include: the 1960s scoop of Indigenous children who were taken from their families and given to white families to raise; the history of the Hudson Bay Co., which launched the  commercialization of the North; the tuberculosis epidemic that sent hundreds of Inuit south for treatment; the mass slaughter of sled dogs by police in the 1950s and ’60s; or the relocation of Inuit from Inukjuak to the High Arctic.

Without adequate teaching in schools, Olivia says, she is forced to be a walking, talking textbook and set people straight wherever she goes. 

Aside from devoting more class time to the history of Aboriginal Peoples, Olivia suggests, there should be exchanges with modern-day Inuit villages “so that people in Quebec know what happened there and what’s it’s like.

“Not just to feel guilty for everything but to know the truth — to do better and to truly reconcile.”

Three months ago, Olivia decided to go back to Kangirsuk to get reacquainted with her people, language and  family whom she hasn’t lived with for 11 years. 

“I got fed up,” she says of her decision to leave Montreal. “I always felt excluded, even in my own country.  I wanted to go back home.”

csolyom@postmedia.com

twitter.com/csolyom 

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