Canada’s Quiet Racism: When Justice Depends on Who You Are
Canada likes to tell a comforting story about itself. We are a polite country. The multicultural success. The place where difference is celebrated and racism is, at worst, an imported problem, an American fever that doesn’t quite take in our colder air. That story is not entirely fiction; anyone who has lived here for decades can see real improvement. But it is incomplete in a way that matters. Racism in Canada hasn’t vanished so much as it has learned to lower its voice, switch venues, and dress itself in procedure.
Yes, things have improved. In most workplaces, open racial taunting is no longer “just how people talk.” Institutions have equity policies, training modules, and glossy mission statements. Police services and courts have, at least on paper, obligations around bias-free conduct. Public language has changed, some for genuine moral reasons, some because people know there are consequences now. This is not nothing. If you compare the present to the 1940s, or even the 1980s, the Canada of today is not the same country.
But improvement is not the same as repair. The deeper problem is that Canadian racism often survives not as a shouted insult but as a quiet advantage, a bent rule, a wink between insiders, or a “common sense” assumption about who is credible and who is not. It survives in the gaps between what institutions claim to do and what they actually protect.
Older generations, especially those raised at a time when Canadian society tolerated “latent racism” as normal background noise, often carried those assumptions into positions of authority. Not every older police officer, judge, or prosecutor is biased. Many have tried, sincerely, to grow. But it would be naïve to pretend that decades of social conditioning evaporate the moment someone puts on a uniform or a robe. Power doesn’t cleanse prejudice; it can conceal it. And when prejudice is concealed behind discretion, it becomes harder to prove and easier to deny.
I know this because I have lived it.
More than 25 years ago, a Roman Catholic priest made an illegal U-turn, struck my vehicle, and sped away. I did what many people would do when they feel wronged and ignored: I followed, got the licence plate, and tried to hold him accountable. Instead, I was stopped by the Ontario Provincial Police and charged for speeding in a 40 mph zone. I explained what happened. The officer radioed ahead. The driver who hit me and fled was identified, not just as a priest, but as a Roman Catholic priest connected to Kingston Federal Penitentiary.
We were both summoned to court. You would think, in a fair system, the core fact would matter most: a collision, a hit-and-run, accountability. But courtroom reality has its own gravity. The prosecutor raised the brief as the priest was questioned. The judge remarked that cases like this “should be done privately.” Then, in a moment that still stings, the judge looked at my car and casually suggested it was probably owned by my father.
That one comment tells you more than a paragraph of legal theory. It wasn’t simply rude; it revealed an assumption, about status, about credibility, about who belongs. It implied that I was a boy playing adult games, a person whose claim to property (and by extension, to legitimacy) was second-hand. Meanwhile the priest walked away free of any charges, and I was left with a repair bill of more than two thousand dollars. He wanted me to sign a document saying he wasn't responsible , I refused.
The lesson was not subtle: institutions may speak the language of neutrality, but they can still practice selective sympathy. When the system sees one person as a community pillar and another as a “type,” the scales move without anyone having to say a racial slur out loud.
This is why many Canadians can honestly say, “I don’t see racism,” while others can honestly say, “I can’t stop seeing it.” It depends on where you stand when the discretion is exercised, who gets the benefit of the doubt and who gets suspicion as their default.
Canada remains, in many ways, a hidden racist society, particularly noticeable in pockets of the old British-patriate culture that still clings to the idea that some people are “from here” and others are “here for now.” It also persists in a smaller, coarser corner of the population where racial slurs still spill out, less common than before, but hardly extinct. I have heard those comments myself. And what makes it worse is the smugness behind them: the assumption that the target is somehow less invested, less contributing, less entitled to full belonging. The irony is painful. Many immigrants and minorities have paid a lifetime of taxes, built businesses, raised families, and kept communities afloat, often while being treated as guests who should be grateful for the invitation.
A few years ago, I heard one of the most brilliant criminal lawyers speak at a service club. His statement stayed with me because it was blunt, unromantic, and cruelly practical: if you are a minority, Native, Italian, Portuguese, East Indian, African, or Caribbean, and you come before the Canadian legal system, “May God help you.” He wasn’t claiming every judge is biased or every case is rigged. He was pointing to a pattern: outcomes and experiences can depend on who you are, and the system’s safeguards do not always safeguard everyone equally.
He even noted that certain appellate judges were so predictably resistant to change that, if a brief came before them, the odds of overturning a decision were slim. That is not how faith in justice is built. That is how cynicism becomes survival.
And if anyone thinks these are just old stories from a rougher Canada, they should read current headlines. The CBC recently reported allegations from a lawyer who says she was left bloody and swollen after multiple Durham Regional Police officers slammed her head on a desk, put knees on her back and neck, ripped off her head scarf, and dragged her to basement cells at the Oshawa courthouse, without provocation. The account, if proven accurate, is horrifying on its face. But what makes it politically explosive is the setting: not a dark alley, not a chaotic street scene, but a courthouse, supposedly a temple of rights and due process.
If a Black woman practising law can be treated with “rage, disrespect, and contempt” in the very place where justice is administered, what does that say about the everyday person with no title, no connections, and no microphone? It says that some officers in some jurisdictions have not moved as far from the 1940s as we like to imagine. It also says that “professionalism” and “training” don’t automatically defeat the culture of impunity, especially when security roles are filled by special reserve officers or others operating in the grey space between police power and public accountability.
So yes, Canada is improving. But improvement is not a victory lap. It is a warning light. Progress can stall. It can become performative, more slogans than substance. The real measure is not how polite we sound but how fairly we treat the person who has the least institutional protection when they collide, literally or figuratively, with someone the system instinctively respects.
If Canada wants to keep congratulating itself, it should at least earn it. That means transparent accountability for police misconduct. It means judges who understand that “private” handling often translates into public injustice. It means prosecutors who don’t defer to clerical collars or professional status. It means court security that treats every person, lawyer, accused, witness, citizen, with dignity. And it means Canadians who can hear these stories without rushing to defend the national brand.
Racism in Canada may be quieter than it used to be. But quiet racism is not harmless racism.
It is simply racism that has learned how to survive the spotlight.
Sarge