Anti-racism forum highlights need for more resources, importance of speaking out

People who experience racism, or now understand what it is when they see it, often have few accessible places to go for relief in New Brunswick.

At PRUDE Inc.’s first anti-racism forum, most of the questions from attendees to the five panellists revolved around what employees, students, teachers or members of the public can do when they experience racism or witness it.

Manju Varma, who was New Brunswick’s first commissioner of systemic racism, made 86 recommendations in December 2021, after studying the situation in the province.

As a panellist on Tuesday, Varma said the province does have resources, like the Human Rights Commission or the New Brunswick Multicultural Council, but there’s still work to be done to make them accessible and properly funded.

“One of the things that government can do is to make our processes simple, to simplify and to provide resources to the groups that are working on these issues,” she said.

Panellist Claire Roussel-Sullivan, chair of the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission, said her organization is always there to help educate people about racism and enforce the Human Rights Act.

But a complaint can take months or a year to go through the system, mostly because of the sheer numbers and the commission’s lack of resources, she said. The commission is also limited by the act, which applies in very specific circumstances.

“The road hasn’t been easy for us to get here … from 1967 when the legislation was created,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s going to be easy [now] either.”

“We need to convince a lot of people in New Brunswick that diversity is the way to go, that discrimination should be out the window,” she said.

Claire Roussel-Sullivan, chair of the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission, says her organization is always there to help educate people and enforce the Human Rights Act, but they’re limited by resources and what powers the act gives them.

Another panellist was anti-racism coach Therese Trofimencoff who works with schools in New Brunswick’s anglophone school districts to provide lessons on how to identify and combat racism.

She can probably attend to an issue of racism more quickly than the commission because she’s there on the ground, said Roussel-Sullivan.

Trofimencoff said she loves the work and has seen real change come from it since she started a few years ago. She’s seen a willingness from kids to become activists and learn about how to be inclusive. However, she said she is only one person, and only deals with students and administration.

She said she sometimes gets emails from teachers and educational assistants about a problem they’re facing, and she can only deal with it “indirectly,” especially if the racism is subtle or comes from ignorance.

“It comes kind of sideways, like ‘What should I do in this case?’ That’s a little bit more complex,” she said. “You kind [of] have to be sneaky and try to get in there and explicitly teach not to do the thing that’s subtly racist.”

Panellist Ivan Okello, project manager of anti-racism initiatives with the New Brunswick Multicultural Council, said it used to be a “question of opinion” that systemic racism exists in New Brunswick. But with more data, people are moving on from questioning it, and trying to address it.

“This leads me to ask, where are we going from here?” he said. “What is the cost of inaction?”

He said everyone — not just people who experience racism — pay that cost.

“It would be the newcomers that we cannot keep because they’re struggling to find work, or the foreign-credential-educated graduates that cannot find expertise to get employment,” he said. “Can we pay that price?”