Fight for justice is lifelong for Montreal's anti-racism commissioner

Bochra Manaï believes the city has come a long way in the two years since she was hired. “We’re in a different place,” she says.

Montreal’s anti-racism commissioner was a 10-year-old refugee when she first got called a “sale Arabe,” or dirty Arab.

It was Bochra Manaï’s first day of school in Paris, in October 1992. Months earlier, she had fled Tunisia with her mother and four siblings to join her father in France. They had spent two months in Algeria, which was in the midst of a civil war, and three days in the international zone at the airport in Paris, after her mother requested political asylum during a stopover on a flight to Vienna.

Her parents had been in increasing danger in Tunisia, as dissidents to the burgeoning dictatorship of president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Their home was under surveillance. Her brother had been imprisoned, her sister expelled from school.

As Manaï stood in front of her new classroom in Paris, the teacher asked her classmates to introduce themselves. One girl — “Francesca, I still remember her name,” Manaï said — refused, going on a tirade about “dirty Arabs.”

Two things prevented Manaï from being scarred by the incident. First, her teacher took charge of the situation and took Manaï under her wing, keeping her during recess for the next several months to help her catch up to the rest of the class; by the end of the year, she was among the top students. Second, her mother was outraged when she learned what happened, and told Manaï to never let herself be insulted or intimidated by others.

The experience, which Manaï calls her “first date with racism,” set her on a life path of academics and activism that led her to earn two master’s degrees — one in urban geography and another in inter-ethnic relations — and a PhD in urban studies from Montreal’s Institut national de la recherche scientifique. She worked for two years as director of Montreal North anti-poverty group Parole d’excluEs before being named the city’s first commissioner on racism and systemic discrimination, in 2021.

To mark the second anniversary of her hiring, on Jan. 18, the Montreal Gazette talked to Manaï about her journey, and her first two years on the job.

She was greeted by an uproar. Manaï was named to the position following a months-long search by the city in response to recommendations from the Office de consultation publique de Montréal in June 2020 that found the city had turned “a blind eye” to systemic racism and discrimination within its bureaucracy and the police force.

A spokesperson for Premier François Legault said her appointment was “questionable given her stance on past issues” and “a mistake” by Montreal’s administration. In 2019, Manaï, a spokesperson for the National Council of Canadian Muslims, had been involved in the legal challenge to Bill 21, Quebec’s secularism law.

Balarama Holness, whose group Montréal en Action spurred the report from the city’s consultation body that resulted in the creation of her post, said Manaï’s hiring was a missed opportunity and sign of “anti-Blackness” by the mayor’s Projet Montréal party, since Manaï isn’t from the Black community.

She was ready for the outcry.

“I was serene,” Manaï said. “I knew it was going to be a rough ride. But I had so much support.”

Speaking in her defence at the time, Mayor Valérie Plante said it was “a very rigorous process, and Mme Manaï went through all the different tests. She’s got a lot of experience on the field but also her academic records are quite impressive. So we believe she will be able to take us to another level.

“It’s about looking at all the different divisions, the different ways we work at the city of Montreal, hiring, everything will be going through her analysis so we bring more diversity, so we’re more aware and fighting any type of discrimination at the city of Montreal.”

Manaï received a tidal wave of encouragement from friends and colleagues, and most important, unconditional support from her immediate boss, Montreal city manager Serge Lamontagne.

“In less than a month, he took me on a tour of management,” she said. “I met all the leaders and managers for the city, and he said, ‘I chose Bochra for such and such reasons. You’re going to be challenged, but we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it respectfully.’”

They spent much of the past 24 months conducting a complete overhaul of human resources across all city departments, organizations and boroughs to make everything from the hiring process to day-to-day operations more equitable and inclusive.

“You have to like speed (in this job); it goes fast,” Manaï said. “And you have to like working with different people. I work with service directors, and I lead workshops in boroughs with blue collar workers and foremen. The city is 28,000 employees.

“It’s thinking about culture, providing services, roadwork, all these people have to be sensitized to topics of racism and discrimination. You have to be able to navigate between different vocabularies. … You have to accept that there are people who don’t know about these topics, or who just don’t give a damn.”

How does she respond to such resistance?

“You have to communicate that it’s an organizational stance,” she said. “You have to explain to people that the city decided this. The municipal administration decided this. And we’re going to get there together. Over the past two years, I think I’ve shown that I work with respect — we’re not here to play around, but we will move forward while taking everyone by the hand, and we won’t forget anyone.”

Manaï is looking at the long game. While it may be hard at this stage for the average citizen to observe the tangible results of such internal tinkering, she says it’s the only way for the city to move on to tackling the bigger issues in order to bring about lasting change. That breadth of vision is part of what got her hired.

“I showed my colours from the start,” Manaï recalled. “I said, ‘The most important thing in the first few years is human resources, because if you don’t work on human resources and you don’t diversify the troops, if you don’t review how complaints are treated internally, if you don’t revise your policies — like our policy of respect of the person, or our code of conduct — if we don’t update the DNA of the organization, whether we’re talking about racial profiling, culture or citizen participation, we won’t get there. Because the DNA of the organization has to accompany people in this transformation.”

Human resources, she notes, involves everything from recruitment to training and promotions. The ultimate goal is for racialized and non-racialized employees to have the same chances not only of being hired but of moving up through the city’s various departments. And for racialized Montrealers to be able to look at their boroughs and see people like them employed at all levels. Obtaining such an outcome requires a complete structural transformation of human resources citywide.

Among her proudest accomplishments of the past two years, Manaï lists: working with the Ville-Marie borough in 2021 on a plan for equity, diversity and inclusion; a six-month initiative with the city’s 911 operators in 2022 to ensure that prejudices expressed by some callers don’t get passed on to the police officers sent to respond to a crisis; and accompanying the city’s human resources department in ensuring the diversity of the selection committee that in November chose Montreal’s new reform-minded police chief, Fady Dagher.

While she refrained from offering her personal opinion on Dagher’s appointment, Manaï stated that the former Longueuil police chief’s track record speaks for itself.

“I think he has demonstrated elsewhere what he’s capable of,” she said. “We’re a metropolis with a police force upon which there are a lot of expectations. And as Bochra the anti-racism commissioner, I’m reassured to know that the challenges of the coming years will be shouldered by someone like him. He has the experience but also the vision. And I think he’s someone who listens. That’s extremely important.”

Last March the city announced 12 goals for the coming year, including creating a division responsible for diversity within its human resources department, making it easier for city employees to file complaints, continuing efforts to eliminate racial and social profiling by police, combatting hate crimes, promoting links with Indigenous communities, ensuring more diversity in festivals and cultural events, overcoming inequalities between neighbourhoods and fighting housing discrimination.

This coming March, Manaï and representatives from various municipal departments will provide an update on the city’s progress on these issues. That accountability process is a key component of the city’s engagement to citizens, Manaï says.

“I see it as a way to mobilize the city’s services, directors and professionals to say to Montrealers, ‘Here is your public service. Your public service is now capable of speaking about racism and systemic discrimination.’”

While she wouldn’t go into detail about what will be announced, Manaï believes Montreal has come a long way in two years.

“We’re in a different place,” she said. “There is a willingness to collaborate on the part of all city services. At the beginning, I think people needed to know who I was and to build trust. Today, there’s no doubt that trust is there.”

tdunlevy@postmedia.com

twitter.com/TChaDunlevy

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