Thank you, Ms. Normandin. Bonjour.
I agree very much with the comments of Faakhra. I think that the majority of Canadians are not hateful people or are not intending to cause harm, but we're all human. This goes for every single one of us on this call, myself included. We have our own prejudices and we have our own biases. They are informed by our surroundings, our environments and our upbringing, to the extent that if we're not examining what our biases are and if we're not having conversations about them, then unfortunately, we can act out on them.
Drawing it back to online again, what's happening is that people are finding their echo chambers. Where you already have a predisposition to a particular viewpoint—even if, in the past, you may have not been inclined to do anything about it—when you find your echo chamber that's encouraging you and goading you on, unfortunately, that's creating situations for people who might not otherwise have spoken out about their personal prejudices. They're finding that the Internet is a safe space for them and they're encouraged to put that out there. That, in turn, encourages other people, so it proliferates that way.
I like to think that people inherently are good and that, given a choice, most people wouldn't want to harm their neighbour, their friends or their colleagues. If you know someone and they've been humanized to you, it's much more difficult to hate them, dislike them or to see them as foreign, suspicious and scary. Some of overcoming these barriers requires us to know each other and get to know each other. That means we need more participation in every aspect of society.
I started on Bay Street 14 years ago and there was nobody who looked like me. It just didn't exist in the Bay Street firms. I saw this as an opportunity to speak to my colleagues. I was always very open and I encouraged people to ask me questions. I know if they don't ask me questions, then they're probably assuming and that's not good. I found the discussions to be really eye-opening. People just have questions. They don't know any better and assumptions are made, yet when they have an opportunity to have an honest conversation with someone, people are open to expanding their horizons. Once you become friends with someone, those things fall away and we're just two people having a chat. It would be good to have programs that encourage people to get to know each other.
I do think that as a society—as Canadians—we also have to be aware that just because we pride ourselves on being a multicultural and diverse society that lauds diversity, this somehow means that Canadians don't harbour these racist sentiments. Unfortunately, many Canadians, both in cities and in rural neighbourhoods, continue to harbour these unfortunate sentiments. I don't think they do so maliciously. I think a lot of it is in ignorance, but it exists. I think we would be silly to think that we're a post-racial society. We're not.