English-speaking parents complain of prejudice in Quebec

For months, a Montreal family had to work closely with child protective services to prove that there was nothing wrong with their three-year-old son. The parents were unhappy that the child had been attending kindergarten for more than a year, but it never even occurred to the staff to talk to them before filing a complaint of mistreatment.

Although the child had been swearing for six weeks, no one tried to explain to him that it was not okay or to ask the parents to take action. Instead, the kindergarten staff member first went to the management and then carefully recorded all incidents until the management decided that there was enough evidence for a complaint. The child's mother attributed the kindergarten staff's behavior to the fact that she and her son are the only African-Canadians in the facility.

Quebec Child Protective Services is taking so many children of English-speaking immigrants, Indigenous people and visible minorities into its care that it already looks like systemic racism. There have been numerous expert reports and statistics published in recent years that show

• parents of English-speaking black children are five times more likely than white children to be referred to social services, even though African-Canadians in Quebec are only 15%;
• indigenous children were not allowed to speak their native language in shelters, even to each other, because there was no one among the staff who understood it;
• as elsewhere in Canada, Native people have often been subjected to the imposition of Western cultural norms and to the selection of children on that basis.

It is worth noting that not so long ago there were outrageous cases of child abuse in Quebec, when social services did not perform at their best. Twenty percent of children in Quebec's public care end up homeless shortly after adulthood. No wonder people are outraged when a perfectly well-to-do African-Canadian family is threatened.