(OTTAWA) A quarter of Canada’s border services officers say they have directly witnessed acts of discrimination by co-workers against travelers in the past two years alone.
Posted at 6:25 a.m.
Of the respondents, 71% said that the discrimination was based in whole or in part on the “race” of the travellers, and just over 75% cited nationality or ethnic origin.
These data were drawn from a survey conducted as part of an internal evaluation of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). This analysis looked at how travelers were treated by border officials in terms of gender, “race”, ethnicity, religious belief, age, and physical or intellectual disabilities. , as well as the interactions between all these factors.
The CBSA recently made public on its web portal the results of this assessment, which focuses primarily on travelers arriving in the country by air.
As part of this research, 922 agents and supervisors were interviewed between March 2 and March 22, 2020.
Among the respondents who admitted to having seen colleagues commit acts of discrimination, slightly more than two out of five officers never reported the facts. Some justified their silence by fear of reprisals or quite simply by a feeling of discomfort.
Only 16% of officers who witnessed discrimination reported what they saw. However, some of them revealed that they encountered obstacles in trying to report the injustice. Others said they were not taken seriously or that no action was taken after they were reported, the report reads.
Traveler screening activities do not intentionally target people based on perceptions of their “race” or ethnicity, the report argues. The agency uses a combination of information sources, such as global trends and various reports, in developing scenarios that are continually revised for human rights and other considerations.
The CBSA nevertheless recognizes that certain practices can have unintended consequences leading to an overrepresentation of racialized communities in the crosshairs of law enforcement.
Moreover, the authors of the report deplore the fact that very little data is available to analyze the behavior of CBSA officers according to the racial or ethnic particularities of travellers.
According to the authors, if complaints were to be filed in connection with a case of racial discrimination, the agency would be unable to demonstrate whether its practices are discriminatory or not. Changes are needed in data collection practices as well as in processing and archiving.
A strong majority of survey respondents said they agreed with having to acknowledge their personal biases and unconscious biases in order to do their job well.
In conclusion, the CBSA’s internal evaluation makes several recommendations, including a call for the establishment of an effective process for denouncing acts of discrimination committed against travelers without fear of reprisal for officers.
In a response included in the report, the CBSA agreed and committed to creating this mechanism this year.