Systemic Racism in New Brunswick -- A Closer Look

Saint John lawyer Neil Clements and Dr. Timothy Christie, Regional Director of Ethics for Horizon Health, believe the presence of systemic racism in New Brunswick needs to be addressed by government officials and that racist acts need to be criminalized as a first step towards addressing systemic racism. 

Systematic racism, from the experience of Neil Clements, is the fact that “disproportionately, black and brown folk do not have similar access to opportunities, be it financial, employment, equal access to the criminal justice system.” One obvious example, he mentioned, can be found in our education systems where children belonging to different minorities are not provided with any information or context to the history of their ancestors.

Dr. Christie elaborated on this concept, stating that ultimately it comes down to “the way structures are set up”. Whether it be the blatant racism that we as a society are used to labeling or the discreet unintentional racism in public sectors, “the structure of the way that we even address racism in NB is set up to be ineffective, it is set up not to work,” and that “the criteria that we use to get into these privileged positions are kind of blocked to people because of their social circumstances or structures.”

Moving forward, Clements encourages the people at home and within our communities to participate in voicing our support and opinions, and that when it comes to fighting for change, “the world has already decided that this is wrong, it’s pretty obvious, the lights are on, everybody can see”. He says, “this is our lobby, and it will take all of our voices”. In regards to what needs to change or what can be changed, Christie says that racial discrimination should be a crime in the Criminal Code of Canada, followed by Clements commenting that “it would take simple amendments to ensure that it is actually enforced.” It is not their job to tell people what their opinions should be, but when it comes to systems of power, our elected officials, leaders, and public enforcers need to “ be actively working to systematically dismantle systematic racism” rather than remaining silent or just watching their language. 

An example of systematically dismantling systemic racism can be found within the movement of defunding the police. “The police budgets have kind of inflated themselves, so they’re heavily unionized organizations and it’s really hard to make money out of them,” says Christie, and although he is more inclined to phrase it as “disarming the police”, he believes that “if we take some of that out we can put it in say a social service, so if we’re doing wellness checks we can have trained health care professionals go do that as opposed to an armed police officer”, and that “the idea of defunding the police is trying to say ‘is there a better way to allocate those resources?’”

In light of current events, Christie explained that everything that is currently affecting our political and social environment (global pandemic, awareness of hate crime frequencies, etc) is a major contributor to the resurfacing of the Black Lives Matter movement in regards to its role in mainstream media. “In a global pandemic, people have a different focus on things I think has helped us shape our public perspective on what’s truly important”, and “now we have footage, now we have videos, we have time and time again, and I think quite frankly people are fed up with it.”