MNAs clash over racism hearings
Liberals defeat motion to cancel them as process officially begins
There was definitely no meeting of the minds.
Perhaps it’s the complex nature of the issue. Or maybe it’s the fact a provincial election is only a year away, which means nobody is taking talk of fixing complex problems seriously since, well, there’s no time and all the players on the board will change.
But National Assembly politicians Wednesday spent about two hours spinning their wheels, flinging mud at each other on the issue of systemic racism and discrimination in Quebec society. Nothing was settled or fixed. Officially, the debate was on a motion pitched by the Parti Québécois and backed by the Coalition Avenir Québec. It read the National Assembly acknowledges “widespread discontent” over the government’s public consultations on systemic racism and discrimination and demands it cancel the whole operation.
Needless to say, the Liberals quashed it with their majority. The final vote, just after 5 p.m., was 36 for and 59 against. The nays included the MNAs from Québec solidaire, the party that pitched the idea of hearings in the first place in the wake of the rise of nasty incidents.
In French you would call what transpired in the house before the vote a “dialogue de sourds.”
On one side of the room was the government, represented by Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil saying the hearings Quebec has launched this fall are “absolutely necessary.”
“You can talk to your neighbours, friends, colleagues,” she told reporters earlier. “There’s always somebody who has lived it (racism). Everybody knows it’s a reality.”
On the other, two suspicious opposition parties — united for a rare moment — wagging their fingers and saying the government wants to put Quebecers on trial for electoral purposes.
They say they won’t be steamrollered into a government witch hunt to portray them as intolerant as a way of shoring up its own vote among minorities.
“The conclusions of this process are already written,” Coalition Avenir Québec MNA Nathalie Roy said sarcastically at one point of the debate Wednesday. “On one side, the good Liberals, on the other the bad caquistes who are intolerant.”
Let’s be clear. Everyone here agrees there are racists out there and they are hurting Quebec. The opposition’s line, however, is that the time for talking about it is over and now Quebec needs concrete action. PQ MNA Carole Poirier stood in the house and read extracts from reports dating back to 2009 stating the same thing.
Jean-François Lisée and CAQ Leader François Legault — fuelled by editorialists saying the process is flawed — said this week the premier should face the reality that not many support his plan and just “pull the plug.”
“It (the process) is going to feed resentment,” Lisée said Wednesday at a news conference. “There is racism and discrimination in Quebec, we know that. But instead of solving the issue, we give voice again and again and again to people who say ‘Quebecers are racist.’
“If you want to solve the issue, solve the issue.”
“Some people are racists, but there’s no system,” Legault added at a separate news conference. “Mr. Couillard is trying indirectly to treat Mr. Lisée and myself as racists.”
The exercise has, in fact, been mired in controversy from the get-go when the government announced the hearings back in July. To deflect criticism it won’t be independent, Quebec asked the Quebec Human Rights commission to handle the process. That organization itself has been beset with internal problems since the
arrival of its new president, Tamara Thermitus. In August, La Presse revealed Thermitus has been accused by three of her workers of abusing her authority, bad management and showing a lack of respect.
And there has been general confusion over whether the hearings would be public or behind closed doors. On Wednesday, Couillard again tried to clarify.
“All the polemic (about the hearings) is about whether witnesses will testify in public or not,” he told reporters. “The principle is the following: Do everything in public unless a person asks, for personal reasons which are understandable, to do it in a private manner.
“But the essence of their testimony will find its way into the report of the commission.”
Also on Wednesday, Fo Niemi, executive director of the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations and a veteran of such issues, gave the hearings his stamp of approval, saying too many politicians are in denial. On multiple occasions, the courts have found systemic racism is real, he said in a telephone interview.
Despite it all, Thermitus officially launched the process Wednesday, releasing the names of 31 organizations — twice as many as originally believed — that will handle the hearings on the local level all over Quebec in the month of October.
Citizens will be able to talk about incidents of discrimination in their lives and propose solutions. A website will also be launched in October.