If, like so many others, the mere mention of COVID-19 comes out of your ears, tell yourself that we are still far from the day when we can talk about this whole saga in the past tense. This does not prevent us from already drawing initial conclusions.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
A recent report allows us to confirm that if we pasted a map of poverty in Quebec on top of each other and another on the regions and neighborhoods that have suffered the most from a certain repression of health, we would almost believe we were seeing a photocopy.
Among the most striking conclusions of its very recent report, the Profiling Observatory (ODP) of the University of Montreal considers “that the management of a health crisis should be based on justified health measures, recognized as fair and equitable, and not on coercive and punitive measures that reinforce social inequalities and discrimination”.
After a first report published in March dealing with police data and a punitive approach that it considered unnecessarily alarming in the face of COVID-19, the ODP this time looked at the legal consequences of the 31,845 findings of offenses imposed between March 2020 and June 2021 in Quebec. This includes the first five-month curfew, which alone is responsible for nearly 25,000 of them, while this figure was only 15,000 in Ontario, a province yet almost twice as populous.
To take just one particularly glaring example, 18 to 24-year-olds alone had accumulated 8,500, even though they make up only 10.8% of the Quebec population.
With nearly half of the 15,000 Quebecers arrested contesting their arrest, it is not hard to imagine the astronomical costs, congestion and bottlenecks this will have on our judicial system and our collective psyche, which have as much just need a slap in the face.
Unlike other provinces, Quebec health authorities do not collect “ethno-racial” data on people who have received tickets in connection with non-compliance with health measures. Probably to avoid accusations related to real or supposed racism. These data would however make it possible to know if certain communities are more affected than others by the virus (cultural reasons, refractory to vaccines, ill-informed, etc.) and if racial profiling has taken place or not. The principal researcher, Céline Bellot, herself recognizes that this is an important limitation of her report.
We all remember this (tragicomic) saga in which groups working with the homeless, in addition to challenging the curfew itself, at least demanded that they be exempted. In fact, you don’t need a post-doctorate to know that there is no answer to the question “it’s past 8 pm, go home” when precisely you don’t have one, from home. Sinking into his stupidity, the Prime Minister even went so far as to claim that “normal” citizens might be tempted to “disguise” themselves as homeless people to circumvent the law.
When you think for five seconds of all the “glamor” of pretending to be homeless in the dead of winter to get to town when convenience stores closed at 7:30 p.m., it’s hard not to rage before such a display of prejudice.
Especially since we remember that Raphaël André, an Innu, was found frozen to death in a chemical toilet for fear of police repression. A lavish burial, dare I say, considering that many people find those blue cabins just too repulsive to even relieve themselves in.
For the record, it is probably not superfluous to recall that it was not the protests of groups working with the homeless or even the criticisms of the media that made the CAQ change course. Despite the absence of any scientific evidence supporting the imposition of a curfew and the very reluctance of some public health departments in the province, not to mention the unanimous condemnation of all front-line actors. , it took a judgment from the Superior Court to exempt the homeless from the obligation to “return home” after 8 p.m.
All these figures and observations – there are so many others – lead the ODP to conclude with a criticism expressed from the outset by the entire community sector: the CAQ created “a real confusion between a state of health emergency and a security emergency […] and that the harmful effects of this approach tend to affect marginalized communities more.”
Surely we all agree here, there is hardly anyone who has come out of this pandemic growing taller. But for those of us who were already drowning, was it necessary to add a few more ladles?