Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante has told a judge that victims of social and racial profiling have the right to compensation, but it needs to be awarded based on a defined process to avoid wasting taxpayer dollars.
Plante testified today in a class-action lawsuit that claims the city hasn’t acted to combat systemic racial profiling by its police officers.
She fielded repeated questions by a lawyer about why visible minorities are still treated unequally, more than 30 years after the city first publicly committed to tackling racial discrimination.
Plante told the court there’s no “magic wand” to eliminate systemic racism and racial profiling, but that both the city and police have been accelerating their efforts to do so.
She said there are processes in place to compensate victims, including the police ethics committee and the province’s human rights commission.
The lawsuit heard by Quebec Superior Court Justice Dominique Poulin is led by the Black Coalition of Quebec and Alexandre Lamontagne, a Black man who alleges he was brutally arrested and detained by Montreal police outside a bar in 2017 without any valid reason.
They’re asking for a total $171 million to be awarded to racialized people who were arrested or detained by Montreal police without reason between August 2017 and January 2019.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 15, 2023.
