Damning Proof: Quebec’s Leaders Are Fighting to Keep Systemic Racism Alive

Let’s dispense with the polite fiction. Those who insist that systemic racism does not exist in Quebec are not naïve. They are its architects, its beneficiaries, and now, brazenly, its bodyguards. Their denial is not a blind spot. It is a policy. And the evidence is no longer hiding in parliamentary word games — it is splashed across court rulings, news headlines, and the career corpse of a Black woman who dared to defend human rights.

The irrefutable proof begins in the courtroom and ends in the cabinet of Premier Christine Fréchette. Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette is currently waging a taxpayer-funded crusade before the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn the Luamba judgment — a decision in which two Quebec courts affirmed that random police stops violate the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. The lower courts were unequivocal: permitting random traffic stops creates a safe conduit for police to racially profile Black motorists. Jolin-Barrette has never presented a single piece of empirical evidence that these stops make our roads safer. He doesn’t need to. That is not what this is about.

This is about protection. His legal battle is not a quest for road safety; it is a shield for racist police officers. Right now, sixteen Montreal North (SPVM) officers are under investigation for acts so vile they sound like an antebellum nightmare: ripping the locs from Black men’s heads, tearing the hair from Middle-Eastern men, and keeping those body parts as trophies. These officers are the living, breathing consequence of a system that tells certain communities they can be stopped, searched, humiliated, and literally stripped of their dignity without consequence. And Simon Jolin-Barrette is in court fighting to ensure that system stays intact. He is fighting for their protection. This does not merely resemble Jim Crow. It is its legal heir, dressed in a ministerial suit.

What makes the outrage unbearable is the silence — and complicity — of Premier Christine Fréchette. Even as Jolin-Barrette pursues a legal path that a growing body of evidence says will endanger Black, Indigenous, and racialized lives, she has chosen to keep him at the heart of her government. This is not an oversight. It is a declaration of values. Fréchette has sent an unmistakable message: a man whom two courts have effectively rebuked for enabling racial profiling is still fit to be the chief law officer of the province. His danger to anyone who is not white and Francophone like him is not a bug; it is a qualification.

And then there is the ghost in the room: Me Tamara Thermitus. As head of the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, she was a Black woman of Haitian origin tasked with defending Quebec’s human rights. The CAQ government forced her out using a report from the Protecteur du citoyen that they knew — or should have known — was botched from the start. It excluded her version of events, violating the most elementary standard of procedural fairness. Earlier this year, a court confirmed exactly that, ruling the investigation unlawful. Yet the government has never apologized, never made amends, and never faced the obvious question: if Thermitus was hounded out of office by a rigged process, why does the man who is actively working to preserve racial profiling still hold one of the most powerful positions in the province?

The answer is as simple as it is devastating. The CAQ does not object to Simon Jolin-Barrette as Justice Minister because he embodies exactly what the party wants. A pure laine Quebecer, unshakable in his denial of systemic racism, willing to spend public money to defend the very structures that crush racialized people. He is not a liability. He is the ideal.

The members of the CAQ who ask us to believe that systemic racism is a myth are the very same people who, over eight years in power, have systematically dismantled the institutions that could prove otherwise. Had they acknowledged systemic racism at any point during their long tenure, Me Thermitus might still be leading the CDPDJ. The human rights commission might still have a leader who is not afraid to speak truth to power. And a man like Simon Jolin-Barrette would not be anywhere near the levers of justice. Instead, those posts would be filled by people whose competence is matched by their conscience.

Let us call this what it is. The denial of systemic racism in Quebec is not an intellectual position. It is a rearguard action to preserve a racial order. The CAQ is no longer pretending otherwise. Neither should we.