Shamie on you
Posted by Jose Alvarez on November 22, 2008
On November 2004 Gemma Raeburn and two of her friends were cleaning up her garage when six police officers arrived at the scene and drew their guns at them. Their crime? Being black.
Because when you see three black people taking stuff out from a Dollard-des-Ormeaux garage it’s gotta be a break-in right? Well, it turns out the six white cops were wrong and when Raeburn told them that it wouldn’t had happened if she and her friends were white, two of the cops replied with comments such as “bullets don’t see colour” and “why don’t you go back to your own country?”
Completely racist? A Quebec Court judge doesn’t think so. Last month he reversed a 2007 decision by the police ethics committee that gave a one-day and three-day suspension to constables Roger Carbonneau and Isabelle Nault respectively. Judge Mark Shamie seems to think that although the remarks were unfortunate, they weren’t discriminatory.
You’re wrong Judge Shamie. “Why don’t you go back to your own country” is one of the most discriminatory remarks a person can make. By making that comment, these two cops were telling Raeburn and her friends that they were different, that this isn’t really their country because they’re not white and that if they don’t like the way they’re treated they should go back to whatever country they came from.
Judge Shamie’s ruling sends people the wrong message. It says that it’s not a big deal for police officers and other public officials to make discriminatory remarks. And if the police can get away with it, why can’t everyone else?
What Judge Shamie did is nothing else but to condone discrimination. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t judges, the police, politicians, and everyone else in society for that matter fight against discrimination in this country?
People from all over the world come to Canada because they believe they will have a better life here. And yet many of them have to face constant discrimination because of their skin colour, their religion, the way they dress or the way they talk. This is their country as much as it is everyone else’s.
This is our country no matter our colour or the language we speak.
This is our country no matter if we were born here nor not, if we’re children of immigrants or if our family got here 400 years ago.
No one has the right to tell us to go back to our country because we are already there.
Judge Shamie’s ruling is a setback in the fight against discrimination in this country of ours. What a shame.
