The harrowing last minutes of Joyce Echaquan, which she livestreamed in the Joliette hospital in Québec, has again shone a cruel light on the institutional racism that the Canadian state is built on.
The Premier of Québec, Legault, has again denied there is systemic racism in Québec, ignoring the crystal clear evidence. A year ago the Viens Commission investigated discrimination against Indigenous people in public services in that province, yet nothing has happened on the many recommendations.
No doubt it will be claimed that Joyce’s treatment is due to a “few bad apples,” who will be disciplined. Year-long racism in the Joliette hospital is well known. That is not due to a few “bad apples.” This is systemic racism that management in the hospital and politicians in Québec City have done nothing to tackle.
We are reprinting an article by Allie Pev from our recently published magazine that looks at the systemic racism in Canada’s police, another part of the reality of Canadian capitalism.
Police: A Tool of the Capitalist State Against Indigenous People
During worldwide uprisings following the murder of George Floyd and Chantal Moore by police and one day before yet another Indigenous man, Rodney Levi, was killed by New Brunswick RCMP, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated the painfully obvious: “Systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all our institutions, including in all our police forces, including in the RCMP.”
How could it not be an issue? The sole reason for the creation of the RCMP (originally called the North-West Mounted Police) was to clear Indigenous peoples from the plains. A staggering amount of land known as Rupert’s Land was sold by the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada in 1869. Following this transaction, John A. Macdonald, through the North West Mounted Police, began violently removing Indigenous peoples from their lands and confining them to reserves to make way for the settlement of the West. Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont led a powerful resistance of Métis and First Nations peoples against the Canadian government, Canadian Pacific Railway, and land surveyors intent on claiming and developing the territory. Canadians like to tell themselves they have a kinder history than the US; slavery didn’t exist in Canada to the extent it did in America and the visibility of police brutality is starker in the US than it is in Canada. Canadian history is filled with the horrors of police and state sanctioned violence against Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC).
Police were involved in at least 460 fatal interactions with civilians across Canada between 2000 and 2017. 699 police officers were involved in these fatal interactions; 179 of those officers were RCMP, 89 were from theToronto Police Service, 43 from Service de police de la Ville de Montreal and 39 from the Edmonton Police Service.Indigenous and members of the Black community are disproportionately represented in the fatalities, and in every interaction between police and prison. Black and Indigenous Vancouver residents are disproportionately stopped for street checks (police arbitrarily demanding and recording identification absent of any sort of police investigation). Indigenous people, although roughly 5 percent of Canada’s population, make up more than 30 percent of those in federal custody.
The police are a tool of the capitalist statemeant to uphold the class division of society. “To Serve and Protect” is not a false statement, but it is misleading. Police serve capitalist property relations and protect the status quo for the ruling elite with absurd amounts of ever-increasing funds. In the past 10 years, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) budget has grown more than $100 million and education funding in BC has declined by over $100 million. The VPD reported that they responded to more than 5,000 calls related to mental health in 2019 yet provincial mental health and substance use funding continues to be modest at best: $26 million in 2020-2021. Compare this to VPD’s $314 million 2020 budget. Albeit, the above examples draw from two different levels of government, it is clear that money in a capitalist society travels to the reactive side. From marginal funding increases for harm reduction to appallingly low income assistance rates, to the lack of affordable social housing across Canada, the desperately needed community supports are chronically underfunded.
Police culture is racist, violent, and rife with prejudice and unchecked power. Capitalism needs the police to enforce this systemic inequality and will continue to use racism to maintain its control. No amount of cultural competency training and reforms can mend this. Calls to defund the police from Socialist Alternative’s Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant and COPE’s successful motion: Decriminalizing Poverty and Supporting Community-led Safety Initiatives have begun an important dialogue about taking power from the police and back into community control. If the police were abolished under capitalism, another institution to oppress the working class would take its place. We must abolish the capitalist system that uses the police to enforce its rule.
