I can answer in French or English.
First of all, the RCMP has been plagued by systemic racism throughout history. We can go back to the “March West”. We can go back to residential schools, Black activism in Nova Scotia in the 1960s, 911 national security and, lately, racial profiling of Blacks and indigenous people right across Canada, so there's nothing new there.
You can go back to 1941, when you had two Black Nova Scotians who applied to join the RCMP. They were perceived as problems for the RCMP. It was offered to them to write the entrance exam, in the hope that they would fail. Coincidentally, they failed the exam. It wasn't until the 1970s that the RCMP got their first Black member within the organization. There has been a systemic pattern throughout history that cannot be denied.
I'll give you a quick example. For two and a half years when I worked in the RCMP, I assisted a member of the RCMP who was denied promotion on three separate occasions within the same unit that he had been part of for 15 years. The last time he was denied promotion, the person who was promoted was a white individual, and the Black officer had trained that person. Everybody in the unit couldn't believe that this was happening.
What happened is that we filed grievances and we filed for disclosures. Lo and behold, we learned that the decision-maker in that particular case had been disciplined for using racial slurs against Black people in a previous post. This person was put in a decision-making position for a promotional board, and a Black person was a candidate.
Was that person racist? I don't know, but a reasonable person would think that this decision-maker should not have been on that promotional board as a decision-maker. That's part of the systemic discrimination policy that we need to eradicate—