He fought the city for his place in the sun
When I asked why I was treated differently there was no answer. For me it was obvious. It was discrimination.
Jean-Olthène Tanisma thinks back to the days, three decades before any of this, when he played professional soccer in Haiti.
It was the teamwork, he recalls, the sense that they were all working toward the same goal. That’s what gave him the determination and mental fortitude to keep fighting.
Tanisma was never stranded for weeks or trapped under a collapsed building, though he came close. He landed in Port-au-Prince two hours before the devastating earthquake of 2010, but drove past his old stadium on his way out of town before the Earth began to shake.
No, it was more of a man-made disaster he endured — a lonely, epic battle against the city of Montreal that cost him more than $150,000 and 10 years of his life.
In 2006, he sued the city of Montreal, along with the Human Rights Commission, for engaging in systemic racism — for not promoting him to a management position because of his race or ethnicity.
In the end, Tanisma won. Or did he? He’s not so sure. knew I could integrate.”
Tanisma did his bachelor of arts at Université du Québec à Montréal, then a master’s degree in urban planning at Université de Montréal. His thesis was a plan to revitalize Victoria Ave. for the Jewish and other communities in the neighbourhood.
That in turn helped open doors for him at the city of Montreal, and in 1986 he started working in the urban planning department.
But the door was open only so wide.
Tanisma remained on contract with the city for three years. At one point he won first prize in a French-language contest run by the administration, for a text he wrote on the jazz festival. Having studied Greek and Latin in Haiti, French prose came easily. But unlike the other winners, no one came to take his photograph and publish it in a magazine.
A few months later, when he applied to become a permanent employee of the city, he was told he had failed the French test. Flabbergasted, he wrote to then-mayor Jean Doré, who convened a committee to review his test. It turned out Tanisma had been faulted 21 times for not barring his “t”s properly and for “I”s that looked like “l”s. Tanisma was hired.
“Back then, there was a reticence to accept those of us who were different,” Tanisma says. “I’m not saying everyone was racist, but there were bureaucrats and a system that wouldn’t give us visibility for our work.”
His real problems, however, began when after 14 years at the same job, Tanisma applied for a management position. It was 2002, right after the municipal mergers, and four positions had opened up.
He applied to all four but didn’t even get an interview. Only those who held management positions before the merger could apply, he was told.
The four positions were filled, however, by Tanisma’s colleagues. All were “professional class” like him. None had been managers before the merger. All were white.
“I had the competence and I was a team player. We drank beers together, I told jokes. … The four who were hired were Québécois. They were also professionals like me, with the same education. When I asked why I was treated differently there was no answer. For me it was obvious. It was discrimination.”
Tanisma took his case to the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal. It would take them three years to conclude there was evidence to back up the allegations of systemic racism by the city, but they had still not brought the case before the tribunal. (The HRT has in fact never heard a case of systemic racism since it was founded in 1990.)
Tired of waiting, Tanisma went to Quebec Superior Court in 2006 to sue both the city and the HRC. He hired two lawyers and fought the city as it argued for two years that the court had no jurisdiction. In 2008, the Supreme Court finally ruled the Superior Court was the right forum for the case.
In 2013, Justice Mark Peacock ruled in Tanisma’s favour — he was a victim of systemic racism by the city.
Tanisma should be given all the training necessary for a management position as well as access to the opportunities, Peacock ruled. He ordered the city to pay Tanisma $30,000 plus interest (about $42,000 in total).
By then Tanisma had paid out $159,000 in legal fees. He had spent the last seven years systematically ostracized by his superiors at work. He’s been on sick leave ever since.
Forty years after setting foot in Montreal, Tanisma marvels at how his “terre d’accueil” has evolved.
He was watching television the other day, he says — one out of five Montrealers is born outside the country!
“Montreal welcomed me, Quebec opened its arms to me. There is no ghetto here. I feel good here. But what I achieved should be recognized as well. I gave Montreal and Quebec back what I received.”
There are four universities in Montreal — two of them his alma maters — and eight CEGEPs, he remarks.
“We have an incredible pool of knowledge here. We shouldn’t be wasting it because of racism and discrimination.”
His own energy would have been wasted, he said, if he hadn’t been so stubborn. After suing the city, Tanisma says he was not given any meaningful work as he continued to show up at the urban planning department.
“They challenged me to do nothing,” he says.
Instead, he began working on how to develop the city infrastructure for electric cars, research he says has paved the way for the city and the province’s electric car strategies, now being implemented.
But what of all the others, who won’t fight for 10 years for their place in the sun? “How many are relegated to driving taxi cabs and working in factories?” he wonders.
The problem is with institutions and people in power who refuse to change, Tanisma says.
While visible minorities make up 11 per cent of the population in Quebec — and 30 per cent in Montreal — only 38 out of 6,000 employees of the Société des alcools du Québec (0.6 per cent) are from visible minorities, as are 312 out of 20,000 employees at HydroQuébec (1.5 per cent).
As of December 2015, visible minorities made up 12 per cent of the city’s workforce and six per cent of its senior managers.
Tanisma says the government must to take drastic measures to correct the problem of systemic racism — just as it did to fight organized crime and corruption.
“I lost a part of my life in fighting the city, and what did I get for it?” Tanisma asks. “I have been a professional for 28 years and I have never been promoted.” Back in Haiti, at the height of his soccer career, Tanisma met his wife, a franco- Ontarian whose parents had opened the first Canadian restaurant in Port-au-Prince. So when it came time to choose where to continue his studies — Nantes, Puebla or Montreal — the choice was clear.
“I knew about the Quebec reality,” Tanisma says from his home in Dorval. “I had contacts with Canadian development workers and others I played soccer with. So I