Is Quebec Racist? ....Is the Pope Catholic?

              "This isn't racism, it's mosquito protection"           

I can't say I am surprised at the virulent reaction by Quebec politicians and its like-minded francophone media both of which went ballistic over an anti-Quebec tweet by an obscure University of Ottawa professor, Amir Attaran.

"Amir Attaran has written on his personal Twitter account that Quebec’s culture is racist, that the Quebec government is being run by white supremacists, called the province the Alabama of the north and accused Quebec nurses of medical lynching and killing Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman who died in a hospital in 2020".

As one might expect, the province didn't take kindly to the perceived attack on its good name and reputation.
While Quebec brushes off complaints of language discrimination from its native anglo community and charges of racism by its ethnic minorities with nary a shrug, criticism by 'outsiders' is met with righteous indignation and vigorous pushback when complaints or accusations are made in the ROC or worse still, in the USA.
These attacks in the  'international' community are somehow particularly galling and incredibly stinging, accusations to which Quebec remains extra sensitive and prickly.

When Mordechai Richler wrote a particularly unflattering and somewhat devastating portrait of Quebec society in New Yorker magazine back in 1991, it sent apoplectic Quebec nationalists off the rails. Richler is to this day branded a cruel and malevolent defamer by nationalists, considered the prototypical 'Quebec-basher,' perhaps the evil spawn of the legendary fat matronly Eaton's sales clerk, who is accused of making it a condition of service that francophone customers "Speak White!" back in the day of wretched colonialism.

But I digress.
The idea advanced by Professor Attaran that Quebec society is 'racist' is somewhat problematic as there is no objective standard or metric by which to measure how racist a particular society is and there is no accurate opinion poll on the subject to be trusted.
After all who would tell a pollster that Yes, I am a proud racist.

So I have to question how the professor came to his conclusions without a detailed and academically legitimate study. He sounds like a blowhard and publicity hound, bereft of rigour and honesty. 
Citing a couple of cases of overt racism to assert his conclusion that Quebec society is racist is lazy and unworthy of his title as a professor.

But still, he may be right..... 

In the United States, militants in the Black Lives Matter movement label America as a racist society, but in a nation where the majority elected a Black president, it is hard to accept as credible. While there are many racists in the USA, there are many, many more who are not.
So what exactly is the demarcation line for declaring an entire society racist?
The easiest barometer would be to label a society racist where certain groups based on colour, race or religion are officially barred from participation in public life, be it government, the military or law enforcement, the civil service or the education system and most importantly restrictions on housing.  A society that places employment or participation limits based on these criteria can be confidently labelled as racist.
However, such is not the case anywhere in the developed and democratic western world. Not any more. Official discrimination is verboten and those still discriminated against have legal redress.
Both private and public institutions across the western world have overwhelmingly evolved to where minorities are consciously included and indeed promoted in order to repair the historical injustice.
But that doesn't necessarily stop racism.

There remains a certain minority of citizens who quietly maintain their racist beliefs and who quietly and discreetly continue to discriminate against minorities in their personal and even in their professional or work life. These racists continue to exist and thrive in government jobs, law enforcement and the public service, where they quietly deny rights and opportunities to minorities on the down-low.

The question to be considered is not whether Quebec is a racist society, which it is not, but whether Quebec harbours a greater number of citizens who are racist than say other provinces.
In this respect, I would answer in the affirmative based only on my observations of over thirty years travelling the length and breadth of this province as an operator of a chain store with locations across eastern Canada and with almost 50 locations across Quebec. Because my career was largely conducted in French and 90% of my employees francophone, I think I am much more qualified to offer an opinion on the subject compared to an outsider like the good professor who tossed out his charges of racism rather gratuitously.

Before I describe my observations, a paragraph or two on the statistical support for racism in Quebec.
After much study, I sadly conclude that statistics on the subject are scattered and not very useful . Let me briefly explore with you the problem with just one example of just how problematic they can be.

The Bnai Brith, a Jewish lobby organization keeps statistics on antisemitic incidents across Canada, one of the few minority organizations to do so.
Let's examine just what those stats tell us.

According to the collected statistics, there were 2,041 antisemitic incidents in Canada last year, with 34% of the total occurring in Quebec a province that accounts for about 22% of Canada's population. or 50% more than the Canadian average.

Digging deeper we can see that Ontario had about 4 times as many acts of vandalism and violence, certainly more serious incidents.
But it's certainly not the whole story because we need to consider how many Jews live in the province where the incidents took place. Divide the incidents by the number of Jews and we can level the playing field to account for differences in population and demographics. 

The numbers are quite different when taken in context.

As you can see, dividing the antisemitic incidents by the population of Jews in each jurisdiction paints a startling picture of who in Canada is the most and least antisemitic, that is, if we were to use antisemitic incidents as the criterion.
In Atlantic Canada, where there are few Jews, there are proportionally many more antisemitic incidents and actually,  three times more compared to Quebec.
But Ontario is actually 4 times less antisemitic than Quebec and 9 times less so than Atlantic Canada.

Hmmm?? What conclusion can we draw?
Only that the fewer Jews in a community, the higher the incidence of antisemitism.
That might be important in understanding racism in Canada and in Quebec in particular.
Also of interest is Quebec's proportionally very large ultra-orthodox community which garners much resentment for their scofflaw attitude, especially apparent recently in their refusal to obey Covid regulations. This resentment leads to an increase in antisemitism here in Quebec, but also in New York City and in fact, Israel itself. This one fact skews the results and makes comparisons relatively impossible.

Now my opinion.....

The scourge of heightened racism in Quebec may be linked to the very nature of its tribal society.
It seems that societies that are homogeneous, insular and who have a common language not shared internationally may tend to be more racist.
This applies neatly to societies in  China, Japan, Korea and so too I believe, in Quebec.
If you think I am being harsh in labelling these far eastern countries as racist, please follow the links. If anything I am underplaying the situation by not labelling these countries as 'extremely' racist.

In many respects, Quebec's francophone majority lives in a bubble, an outlier society that develops differently, just as the above-mentioned countries do so and which leads to a divergent set of common values developed in an alternate world.
Sometimes I shrug my head in utter disbelief in regards to news stories that demonstrate how out of step Quebec is in regards to racism as compared to Canada or the USA.
While Quebec is proud of this difference and balks at being judged on Canadian or American standards, it allows racism to persist on a level not tolerated elsewhere

Quebec's heightened level of racism is rooted in its fanatical obsession to protect not only its language but its culture as well. 
I'm reminded of the statuesque African woman who testified at the Bouchard-Taylor Commission who in her testimony in perfect French complained that for immigrants like herself, speaking French isn't enough and where she is expected to eat maple syrup and poutine. 
Watch this hilarious video of those testifying

In Quebec, immigrants, anglos, minorities and outsiders, whether they speak French or not are looked upon as a cultural threat. The Quebec media, nationalists, and politicians hammer home the theme of language as a guise or smokescreen for attacking those not of tribal Quebec.  

In Quebec,  a certain level of racism is silently accepted as necessary to supposedly maintain the survival of the collective tribal culture, which is seen to be under attack by 'les autres'. 

I'm not going to enumerate a long list of the racist incidents that highlight the problem, there are too many. The examples I do cite speak to the underlying culture that exists where the differences between the 'real' Quebecois are revealed rather tellingly.

Let's start with the police across Quebec whose racist treatment of natives and Blacks is legendary. 

The Montreal police have forever used the tactic of 'Rousting' which is the policy of stopping targets on a pretext to undergo a search which is really nothing more than a fishing expedition meant to intimidate.
While all police forces used this tactic in the past, it is no longer employed because of its uneven targetting of minorities. New York City had discontinued and famously apologized for its program known as  'Stop & Frisk."
To this day, the Montreal police are infamous for stopping Blacks for no good reason other than to harass. The phenomenon has spawned the uniquely Montreal crime of  "Driving while Black"
Police famously use every excuse on the book (broken taillight, jaywalking etc.) to skirt the law and justify the harassment. 
I give this example because no law or regulation can stop this type of racism because no law or regulation has technically been broken. This is the pernicious racism of Quebec police where all the laws on the books that outlaw racism are ignored with a wink, wink, nod, nod.

The cartoon above lampoons the Quebec provincial police's abysmal and degrading treatment of local native women in the Abitibi region. The police of course were absolved of wrongdoing as per usual by a commission looking into the allegations. The cartoon is rather poignant in underlining how any flimsy excuse is accepted in Quebec to whitewash the racism. 

When the police are dragged before the Quebec Human rights tribunal they are invariably found guilty of racism and ordered to pay but a paltry few thousand dollars in damages. They pay reluctantly and never apologize. This is the reality of Quebec.

Underscoring this blatant yet unvoiced racism are two stories that hit the media this week.

The first was a story about an interview by TVA news' Mario Dumont and the head of the border guards union who complained Hasidic Jews were crossing into Canada by the droves. He told the interviewer that it was chaos at the border with about 8,000 people crossing one border in over two days.
Somehow a TVA editor put up the graphic that 8,000 Jews were entering Quebec a fact not even the racist union leader made. Mr. Dumont was alarmed and offered that perhaps ten or twelve thousand might cross over the next days.
The story was 100% fake news, untrue on every level. The entire Hasidic community in Quebec is less than 10,000, so the numbers are ridiculous. Canadian Border services felt compelled to deny the story completely in a press release,  The agency said that less than 8,000 people crossed ALL THE LAND BORDERS in Quebec that day and that the vast majority were essential workers.
But the fictional narrative played well, pedalled by an ignorant and racist union rep, an out-of-touch interviewer and an inept editor. 
In the end, nobody apologized because, well, I would ask readers to draw their own conclusions.

Last month a legendary racist sportswriter Rejean Tremblay wrote two articles that could never appear anywhere else but Quebec. Mr. Tremblay lives in the past where all the players on the Habs were French and yearns for the good old days. He complained that players without French names and heritage could never be successful 'old-timers' because of their foreign surnames (of which he gave two examples.)  A second racist article actually had to be spiked after the blatantly racist insult on Chinese.

"Everything is going well because we are winning .. The Habs could play 20 Chinese players and it would be okay.
If the KHL convinced the Chinese to embrace hockey, we'd find ourselves with 20 Fang Wongs in 20 years. 

An article was written by Pierre-Oliver Zappa in where else, the Journal du Montreal,  about street gangs taking advantage of the federal government's lax enforcement of those receiving Covid benefits turned into a nightmare for the journalist.
Unbeknownst to him, an editor inserted a photo along with the story of a group of Blacks lining up, a racist implication that they were the guilty party.
The problem was that the photo, selected by the unnamed editor was a years-old stock photo of Black high school students lining up to attend church. I'm not kidding.

Not everyone in Quebec is racist and the mortified journalist made an immediate apology and YouTube video denouncing the photo, even though he had nothing to do with it.

An example of the underlying racism is a story from earlier this year about the town of St. Jean sur Richelieu. It seems that a farmer sold his property for land development many years ago with the condition that no homes be sold to Jews. When the servitude came to light last year it was disqualified by an outraged judge who ordered the exclusionary clause removed from future acts of sale.
That isn't the story.
It seems that some citizens demanded that the street and a park named for the racist farmer be changed and the city said it would study the issue.  You can imagine where that discussion went.
But the icing on the cake is the unabashed son of the racist farmer who proudly defended his father  in an interview;  Link{fr}

"My father got along with everyone, but you see, Jews, they become masters of just about everything and that's what he didn't like"

And lastly is the story of a hospital in Quebec which recently advertised for an employee with white skin.
Really.

"The regional health authority of the Laurentians has opened an investigation into an incident in which one of its departments posted job openings for female orderlies at St-Eustache Hospital that stipulated candidates have “white skin.” 

The story erupted following a report in La Presse Wednesday, which said the postings were made because a resident, described as difficult and suffering from dementia, refused to be aided by a person of colour. 

According to the report, 10 emails sent to placement agencies in November variously specified that the candidate sought to work with a patient in the hospital’s “green” (non-COVID-19) zone must be a “white woman only,” be a “white coloured (orderly),” “must be a white woman” and “must have white skin.” Link

This incident is perhaps the most telling argument that Quebec is more racist than the rest of Canada because it wasn't the work of a rogue idiot or racist. The ad passed through many hands before being sent to placement agencies, none of which complained. This story may represent the smoking gun.

And by the way, as racist as Alabama is, this job posting would never have seen the light of day.
I'd bet on it.