Public Safety Minister Bill Blair spoke with RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki about systemic racism in Canada’s federal police force one day after she struggled to define the term and dodged questions about whether it existed within her organization, CBC News has learned.
Public Safety Minister Bill Blair spoke with RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki about systemic racism in Canada’s federal police force one day after she struggled to define the term and dodged questions about whether it existed within her organization, CBC News has learned.
According to a government source, Blair spoke to Lucki on Thursday about her comments during a regularly scheduled meeting.
Blair, a former Toronto police chief, acknowledged in a statement Wednesday that “Indigenous people, Black Canadians and other racialized people … experience systemic racism and disparate outcomes within the criminal justice system.”
The source told CBC that the discussion between Blair and Lucki sparked a conversation within the RCMP about language surrounding the topic.
On Friday, Lucki released an updated statement saying she was aware that “systemic racism is part of every institution, the RCMP included” and admitted she should have “definitively” acknowledged its existence within the RCMP’s ranks.
Reversing course
The commissioner’s reversal followed a string of media interviews Wednesday in which she wrestled with the notion of systemic racism and whether it was ingrained in Canadian policing.
Lucki told the CBC’s Rosemary Barton that she had heard “about 15 or 20 definitions” of the term, and told the Globe and Mail that if it meant that “racism is entrenched in our policies and procedures, I would say that we don’t have systemic racism.”
A spokesperson for the RCMP said Lucki made the decision to issue a new statement after realizing during the interviews — and hea