MONTREAL Montreal police are on a mission to make the force more diverse and better reflect the population it serves, but advocates say the SPVM has a lot of work ahead to build trust with under-represented communities. Police will soon start outreach programs in high schools to look for students who want to become police officers as part of a strategy to recruit more officers from visible minority communities. “There s been an improvement. We used to answer questions about diversity by saying there is a lack of applicants. Now, we re reaching out to them, we re being proactive,” said Insp. Miguël Alston with the Montreal police.
This May, Canadians will again be asked if they identify as a visible minority when filling out the long-form census. But it’s a concept and term increasingly out of step with the times.
The pandemic has laid bare racial inequalities, and racial justice activist groups, like Black Lives Matter, have put anti-Black racism high on the public agenda. Systemic racism, rather than visible minority status, is at the centre of debate. While Canadians are now talking more explicitly about race, the census has yet to catch up.
“We’re going to have to ask ourselves, what do we want to do with that category now?” says Michael Haan, a demographer and member of a committee that advises Statistics Canada on ethnocultural diversity. According to him, the committee has had many internal debates about terminology.
MONTREAL In a push to be more diverse, the Longueuil Police Service wants to recruit more officers from minority communities, a strategy that the police chief hopes will also build trust among youth. We always have to try to build some bridges between us and the youth, sometimes [there is] a lack of trust. So it s our responsibility as a police department to be able to get closer and closer to the community, police chief Fady Dagher said in an interview with CTV Montreal. We need diversity in the police force. Part of the strategy to diversify the force is to not only target youth, but their parents as well, he said. Dagher, born and raised in the Ivory Coast, said some racialized families don’t want their children to become police officers since they might view law enforcement in their native countries as corrupt. In fact, Dagher said he didn’t tell his own parents he was a police officer until after he joined the academy.
SASKATOON In the face of ongoing anti-Asian attacks, nearly 6,000 Asian Quebecers are heading online to vent, comfort and even hold regular online classes tackling microaggressions and racism. The booming Facebook community “Groupe d’Entraide contre le racisme envers les asiatiques au Québec” is a public, large-scale version of the countless private chat groups many Asians across the country have turned to over the past year. “We are all volunteers trying to do our best to help our communities in our own way, and the best way is online,” Vietnamese Montrealer Laura Luu, who created the group last March, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Tuesday. Her group’s name is translated to: “Mutual Aid Group Against Racism Against Asians in Quebec.”