Red Coalition calls for united stand against racial profiling appeal

By Dan Laxer The Suburban, Nov 13, 2024 Updated Nov 15, 2024

The Red Coalition, a Montreal-based organization fighting systemic racism, is calling on every elected official in Quebec to take a stand in urging the CAQ government not to appeal a recent Quebec Court of Appeal decision on racial profiling.
On October 23, the province’s highest court upheld a previous ruling that random police stops enable racial profiling and that systemic racism results. The controversial provision is Article 636 of the Quebec Highway Safety Code.
In 2022, Quebec Court Justice Michel Yergeau ruled in the case of Joseph-Christopher Luamba, a Black Montreal resident who had been stopped nearly a dozen times without cause. At the time Justice Yergeau ruled that “racial profiling does exist. It is not a laboratory-constructed abstraction. It is a reality that weighs heavily on Black communities. It manifests itself in particular with Black drivers of motor vehicles.” That case went to the Quebec Court of Appeal where Justice Yergeau’s ruling was upheld.
Similarly, last month, as reported in The Suburban, Justic Dominique Poulin ruled that not only does systemic racism exist in the SPVM, but that the city allows it to continue.
Three rulings by three judges, including the highest court in the province, said DeBellefeuille, in a climate where the leader of the provincial government has been insisting for years that systemic racism does not exist. Public Security Minister François Bonnardel posted on X that he was disappointed in the ruling, which DeBellefeuille says is problematic, and the government may even appeal, a move that would send the wrong message, DeBellefeuille says, which is why he wants all leaders to stand against it. “Why, as an elected official, would you want to agree with a law that’s discriminatory?”
Coincidentally, on the day the ruling was handed down another Montreal man, Nigel Berkley, launched his own case, through the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR), against racial profiling after being pulled over several times without cause. The Red Coalition’s DeBellefeuille knows firsthand how that feels, having himself been pulled over without cause several times going back to 2009.
DeBellefeuille would also like to see voters put pressure on elected officials to send a strong message to the CAQ to accept the Court of Appeal ruling. To do so would mean, DeBellefeuille said, that those leaders would accept that systemic racism exists in the face of Legault’s insistence that it does not.