Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government falsely frames the problem as a need for immigrants to integrate in Quebec and to learn French.

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You speak French with an English accent.

Sarah Mazhero has heard a gamut of excuses from a few potential employers to refuse her part-time jobs in retail and public serviceeven though she has customer service experience.

But instinct tells her what really irks the people conducting the interviews is her skin colour.

“You won’t know that I’m black while speaking with me on the phone,” said Mazhero, a political science major at Concordia University who currently works for the student union’s legal information clinic as she applies for law school. But, she added, “you’ll see by their face when they meet you for an interview that it’s not what they were necessarily expecting.”

Mazhero’s experience speaks to what experts call a troubling sub-set in the otherwise encouraging employment data for Montreal and the province.

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While news headlines declare Quebec is currently experiencing a labour shortage and its lowest unemployment in decades, the unemployment rate among visible minorities in its urban centre, Montreal, is double — even triple, depending on the group — that of non-visible minorities.

Statistics Canada uses the term “visible minority,” which is defined by Canada’s Employment Equity Act as individuals other than Indigenous people who are non-Caucasian or non-white. Racialized minorities is increasingly used by experts in its place.

The employment gap is by no means new, and it won’t narrow unless policy makers recognize there are systemic barriers to equal opportunities, said Fo Niemi, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR).

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“Every decade, we see the same data come back pointing toward disproportionate unemployment, particularly among black anglophones and francophones and people of Arabic and Northern African backgrounds,” he said.

“It shows there are still all kinds of systemic barriers out there, whether it’s lack of recognition of foreign credentials and experiences or the lack of equal opportunity for people just because their name sounds different. Sometimes it’s just explicit discrimination.”

According to the latest Canadian census carried out in 2016, the over-all unemployment rate in the Montreal region for people with a university degree was 5.7 per cent. But when the figure is broken down, the unemployment rate was 10.2 per cent for visible minorities and 4.3 per cent for non-visible minorities.

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In fact, unemployment among university-educated Montrealers was highest for people identifying themselves as Arab, black and Latin American, with jobless rates of, respectively, 11.7 per cent, 10.7 per cent and 9.6 per cent.

The pattern was the same regardless of educational level. For Montrealers of all educational backgrounds, the unemployment rate was 6.3 per cent for non-visible minorities and 11.7 per cent for visible minorities. For people identifying themselves as Arab, the unemployment rate was 14 per cent. For people identifying as black, it was 12.9 per cent.

Photo by Pierre Obendrauf / Montreal Gazette

Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government falsely frames the problem as a need for immigrants to integrate in Quebec and to learn French, Niemi said.

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It’s a false premise, he said, because the unemployment rate for visible minorities is double that of non-visible minorities regardless of whether the people identifying as black, Arab, Latin American or Asian were born in Canada or are immigrants.

So for example, the unemployment rate in the 2016 census was 12.4 per cent for Montrealers of any educational background who were born in Canada and who identified themselves as a visible minority, compared with six per cent for non-visible minorities.

“ I think there are very deep systemic barriers in ‘Quebec Inc.’ that need to be addressed,” Niemi said.

“So the whole discourse and the policy direction regarding integration has to be reviewed. It’s not just about forcing or enabling or encouraging immigrants to integrate by giving them more French-language training that they will succeed. One has to look at barriers to equal employment opportunity.”

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Niemi said he regularly hears about people of colour who graduate from French-language universities in Quebec and who have problems finding positions in their field. And he hears stories of immigrants from French-speaking Africans and Northern Africans of Arabic backgrounds who come to Quebec with the language skills and a PhD or master’s degree and still can’t find work. “It testifies to the fact that language is not the issue,” Niemi said.

Mohammed Jaber has been living the problem for nearly 15 years.

Jaber emigrated from Morocco and graduated with a master’s degree in organizational management from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi in 2005. He still hasn’t found work in his field.

What’s more, when he applies for management positions through placement agencies and directly with employers, such as banks, he always winds up being offered jobs in call centres instead, he said.

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He has relented and accepted those jobs, which are often only short-term contracts, with the hope of applying internally for higher-level positions once he’s proved himself. But Jaber said he loses out to applicants he considers less qualified than him.

“I’ll be very frank. I never met a manager named Mohammed,” he said. “They don’t accept that Mohammed becomes a manager. So they say, ‘We need you in the call centre’.”

Jaber has also experienced discrimination in the workplace. The Quebec Human Rights Commission recently awarded him $6,000 in damages after he was repeatedly subjected to racist comments from a coworker under the noses of supervisors in 2016.

Gender adds a second layer of discrimination, said Paul Eid, a sociology professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, who was the lead author of a seminal study for the Quebec Human Rights Commission carried out from 2010 to 2011 that demonstrated racial discrimination in hiring in Montreal.

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Disproportionately high unemployment extends to disproportionately lower income among racialized minorities, he said. “And racialized women are the most disadvantaged.”

For example, the 2016 census data for Montreal showed a 6.8 per cent unemployment rate for black Canadian-born women aged 35 to 44 who have a university degree compared with 2.4 per cent for white women in the same age group and with the same educational level.

As another example, the unemployment rate in Montreal among immigrant Arab women aged 25 to 34 years with university degrees leaped to 18.2 per cent in the 2016 census data.

Eid’s study for the human rights commission had researchers make up two sets of curriculum vitae to respond to 581 help wanted ads. Two CVs were submitted for each job with equal qualifications but a different candidate’s name. The study found that job seekers with an old-stock Québécois name had a 60 per cent greater chance to be called for a job interview than a candidate with an African, Arab or Latin American name.

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Moreover, an African, Arab or Latin American candidate had a one in three chance of not getting called for an interview because of their name.

Eid said he doesn’t think the result would be any different all these years later.

“You have to attack racism and discrimination,” Eid said of the job barrier. Employment equity programs can help, he said.

The greatest inequities appear to be among visible and non-visible minorities who are highly educated, said Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, who has studied the history of immigration and ethnic minorities in Quebec. He, too, finds that gender adds an additional layer of discrimination.

However, Jedwab noted the same trend exists across all urban centres in Canada.

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For example, unemployment among women who identify as Arab and are university degree holders is especially high across the country, he said.

“The inequities between visible minorities with shared characteristics and persons who do not identify as visible minorities remain significant,” Jedwab said. “And we need to be constantly vigilant and working towards reducing those inequities. It’s not a uniquely Montreal phenomenon, it’s a nationwide issue.”

Nevertheless, the perception of discrimination in the workplace appears to be greater in Montreal than Toronto, he said.

A Léger poll carried out in November for the Association for Canadian Studies and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation found that 50.8 per cent of people identifying as black in Montreal said they often or sometimes encountered discrimination in the workplace based on skin colour, with 16.4 per cent saying ‘often’ and 34.4 per cent saying ‘sometimes’.

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In Toronto, 47.8 per cent of respondents identifying as black said they often or sometimes encountered discrimination in the workplace.

Niemi said he has no doubt the situation is worse in Montreal “because many of the systemic barriers that lead to exclusion of people of colour tend to be reduced to a problem of immigrant integration and language, which is often a false problem.”

Moreover, English-speaking racialized minorities face an additional layer of discrimination based on language, he said.

Montreal’s public consultation agency, which just wrapped up hearings on racism and systemic discrimination within the city’s jurisdiction, was told by numerous groups that Montreal has an important role to play in setting an example as an employer, he said.

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It’s not just about representativity in civil service jobs. Niemi also noted that boards of trade, union executives and the boards of municipal agencies and committees, which are opportunities for networking and career advancement, lack diversity in terms of racial background and the English-speaking population.

That doesn’t surprise Mazhero, who notes the city never advertised municipal jobs with Concordia’s off-campus housing and job resource centre while she worked there.

Meanwhile, some of Mazhero’s friends who also say they face discrimination are looking west for job opportunities.

“Some people are leaving if they have the money to leave,” she said. “Even though Montreal has a bit of diversity, Toronto is less bad when it comes to those things. (Moving) is a very big topic.”