The office of the Public Protector, whose mission is to ensure that people’s rights are respected, sadly has a lot of work to do. Indeed, our social services are fraying, leaving citizens with damaged dignity on the sidelines. This week, Marc-André Dowd and his team unveiled another voluminous document which concludes that, despite a commission of inquiry and a report recommending 142 urgent actions, systemic discrimination against First Nations and Inuit continues in Quebec , because it is apparently slow to tackle the heart of the problem.
When they were revealed in 2019, the conclusions of the Commission of Inquiry into Relations between Indigenous Peoples and Certain Public Services in Quebec (Viens Commission) caused a stir. They brutally described the presence of systemic discrimination in the five public services scrutinized (police, justice, correctional services, health and youth protection). Our laws, policies and institutional practices have generated sources of inequity and discrimination against Indigenous people. Let us recall the words of Jacques Viens, president of this commission: “Even more than their rights, it is the dignity of thousands of people which is […] despoiled, because they are kept in deplorable living conditions, on the margins of their own cultural references. In a developed society like ours, this observation is simply unacceptable. »
To erase this embarrassing blemish, the report proposed 142 calls for action intended to shake up the government’s fleas, and to first shake it off from its stubbornness in recognizing the crux of the problem. It is fortunate that the recommendationo 138 gave the Public Protector the mandate to monitor all these actions intended to eradicate systemic discrimination. The Protector concludes that in the space of four years, the government has implemented less than a third of the recommendations. Clearly and distressingly, only 11 of the 142 actions are judged “completed” at the end of the analysis, in addition to 34 others “started satisfactorily”. Quebec, in its self-analysis of recent years, had given itself a much better grade. A year ago, he estimated that 86 of these actions were being implemented, which now seems totally indecent.
The Protector’s examination echoes what is easy to perceive in the actions and reactions of the government: Quebec has launched itself timidly into change without, it seems, recognizing its merits, that is to say – to say the inscription in its structures and in its operation of a form of discrimination against Aboriginal people. Hence the impression of a fragmentation of actions, without real political courage to confront systemic changes. If the recognition of systemic racism is still the subject of an obstinate refusal on the part of the Legault government, in what authentic way can it set the tone to encourage its ministries and services to change their practices?
It is therefore inertia and sluggishness that we find on the road to change. Happy initiatives have arisen mainly from the goodwill of actors on the ground. But where the changes are most expected – in health, for example, where Quebec showed the worst of itself during the tragic death of Joyce Echaquan three years ago – we are still trying to understand what we are talking.
Let us remember: the Viens commission was set up in 2016 after allegations of sexual and physical abuse by police officers were made by Indigenous women from Val-d’Or. We could therefore have hoped for vigorous changes on the part of the police services, but things are stalling. More broadly, indigenous women seem almost abandoned while unacceptable situations, such as forced sterilization which women denounce but which the government does not recognize, persist in health and harm access to services. In several fields, it is this stubbornness in not accepting the injustices experienced by Indigenous people that leads to inaction while further hurting those most affected.
Among the criticisms most frequently identified in the portrait painted by the Public Protector, we note the lack of progress in terms of consultation with indigenous parties, even though it is obvious that this dialogue should be natural as it is essential. Along the way of the pitfalls reflecting the government’s excessive circumspection, we also note the crass incapacity to conclude tripartite agreements involving the two levels of government and the First Nations. For how much longer will Quebec be able to accommodate diagnoses giving it a bad rating without vigorously plunging into change? The time has come to put words into action.