Adelle Blackett: Race and Discrimination in the Quebec Labour Force

In 2016, Canadian-born black Quebecers faced a 13.4 percent unemployment rate, Canadian-born Arab-Quebecers a 14.5 percent rate, and those who don't identify as visible minorities a 6.6 percent rate. In “Facing Race,” a special edition of “The Current” produced by CBC on 9 March 2018 in Montréal, 2016 Foundation fellow Adelle Blackett and her co-panelists Dania Suleman and Philippe-André Tessier addressed the many tropes and challenges around race and discrimination in the Quebec labour market. For instance, Blackett argued that there is a need to move beyond the belief that a lack of language skills explains higher unemployment rates in immigrant or visible minority communities in Quebec. On the province’s Human Rights Commission, she further noted that there was a need to move beyond serving the “aesthetics of equity” to attain “real critical mass in the institutions that matter” to see a substantive decrease in racial discrimination in employment.

Adelle Blackett is a 2016 Trudeau fellow, professor of law and William Dawson scholar at McGill University, and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Transnational Labour Law and Development.

Read and watch her interventions on the show.