It's the data. Okay. Thank you. Yes, I'm happy to answer that.
It's ridiculous in a Canadian context that we are so rarely offered the ability to have what should be publicly accessible data when it comes to race-based incidents. We often have to rely on access to information or special reports such as those that have been done by the Toronto Star. Very recently in Montreal, a report was published. Up until then, one of the only statistics that we had was accidentally leaked to the press by the police, but it was actually not supposed to be published. We have an ongoing secrecy that makes it much more difficult.
However, I also would argue that having access to data still does not stand in for change. In the United States, for example, you have publicly accessible data, but if you don't do something to actually address the racism, you're just documenting it better. I'd highlight both that it's important and that's it's also not enough.
With regard to the second strategy and the way human rights offices work, I do think that these are one of the important places where people are able to, in some instances, get justice. Of course, if we look to the Quebec human rights commission, we know that people are waiting years and years to get access to this trial, and it is quite narrow in terms of who really has access to it. As far as oversight goes, as much as these organizations do important work, it's vastly not enough for the number of people who are regularly experiencing police harassment and police violence. As an example, when we looked to one study that came out in Montreal in 2008, we saw that over 40% of black youth in just one neighbourhood had been stopped by the police that year.
If we look to this as the vastly expansive harm that it is across our society that's happening so regularly, human rights organizations do important work and are not given enough power or funding to really intervene. Anyway, it doesn't do any.... It only provides compensation afterwards for an injustice that never should have occurred in the first place. Again, it doesn't get to the heart of preventing police killings, police violence, etc.