In 2013, Australian researchers were inspired by the famous story of Rosa Parks to carry out a study on racial discrimination. They asked participants from different backgrounds to seek to board a public bus with an invalid ticket. Bus drivers still let 72% of white passengers and 36% of black passengers board. At the time, the study made a lot of noise since it highlighted a dimension of racial profiling rarely addressed in the public space. Call it asymmetrical leniency.
Indeed, in this scenario, a black passenger who would like to file a complaint for discrimination would have no hold: the driver who refuses him access to the bus is only applying the law, without saying anything explicitly racist. Simply, the passenger lives in a harsher world. His face motivates public service employees to apply the law to the letter towards him; while others get away more often with winks and warnings.
If racial and social profiling is so difficult to combat, it is because it most often presents itself in this form. A State agent neither insults anyone nor exceeds his powers; simply, he is more severe and zealous in his work towards citizens from certain social groups. The result, of course, is deeply unfair. But the current mechanisms do not make it possible to deal with this injustice.
When there is a complaint for profiling, the authorities do not seek to determine whether a police officer, for example, has treated certain citizens more or less harshly according to their racial or social origin throughout his career. The investigation will rather content itself with asking: was there a breach of ethics in the case we are examining, and can it be demonstrated that certain identities protected by the charters played a role in this breach? As long as the questions are asked in this way, discriminatory double standards will continue to plague our public services, without much being done about it.
This question of the asymmetrical leniency of our institutions has caused much ink to flow in recent weeks, as police forces choose to respond to the occupation of Ottawa and the blocking of border roads by putting on their white gloves — I assume the wrong pun here. On social media, disturbing images of mass arrests and violent interventions from the 2010 G20 Summit or the 2012 student movement are compared with videos of police officers squarely hugging protesters blocking the Canada-US border. in Coutts, Alberta. It is also recalled that the RCMP arrested more than 1,100 indigenous and environmental protesters in Fairy Creek, British Columbia, just last spring.
As the Freedom Convoy carries and stores canisters of potentially explosive fuel near parliament, one remembers the homeless encampments that the police aggressively razed citing the risk of fire. While there are countless indigenous leaders who have been the subject of tight police surveillance, the authorities are so little concerned about the dangers posed by the extreme right that we have been “surprised” at the intentions of occupation and sedition (clearly stated online) of several convoy organizers. And while racialized parents are reported to youth protection services for nothing, dozens of children have been in the Ottawa convoy for several weeks in questionable conditions.
The double standard is obvious. However, it would be difficult to demonstrate officially that it is because some are racialized, poor or on the left that we have chosen repression. Or because the others correspond roughly to the same demographic profile as the police themselves that we make the choice of leniency, even negligence. We most often find a way to justify the use of violence when it is exercised, as we invoke tactical considerations to explain the choice of white gloves. In short, the paths of the command centers are impenetrable.
The good news is that the current situation allows at least to open a necessary reflection on the way in which these double standards are tolerated in our institutions, and on their consequences. If the occupiers of Ottawa tend to behave with the arrogance of people who think they are above the law, it is probably because they have been above the law for a good part of their life. They have been socialized, like all of us, into a world of asymmetrical leniency. Consider, for example, the Critical Infrastructure Defense Act, which Alberta Premier Jason Kenney passed in 2020 to give himself more power against Indigenous protesters who would like to resist a pipeline project. Of course, the law was hardly used to move the truckers who blocked the border at Coutts: it was not intended to be tough on such a demographic. Presumably, the members of the convoy know this.
The idea here is obviously not to call for “fair” police repression or bureaucratic harassment. Simply, it should be said that if it seems rude that the state applies its harshest methods to the letter against less marginalized citizens, then these methods should be reviewed, even abolished for all. And it should also be admitted that the persistence of double standards in the application of laws is deeply incompatible with the concept of democracy.