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But what remains is still troubling. There are few pockets of society that the report – titled “Taking Action Against Systemic Racism and Religious Discrimination Including Islamophobia” – doesn’t malign as having racial and religious animus bred in the bone.

The witness testimonies, taken together, tell us it’s happening to broad swaths of people in our schools, the legal system, government, healthcare, the workplace and elsewhere. The infractions range in severity from graffiti to murder.

We seem to have a five-alarm fire on our hands, at least based on the report’s 30 recommendations. They cover pretty wide terrain. They call for the creation of new plans, guidelines, directorates, hiring practices, impact assessments and other such make-work endeavours.

Photo by PATRICK DOYLE / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Now this all may come as a shock to Canadians throughout our increasingly ethnically diverse cities and towns happily going about their business in relative harmony with each other, that they are in fact broken to the core.

The report does though offer a bit of a wink in this direction. “As society has evolved and with the advent of human rights legislation and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, these overt forms of systemic discrimination have become rare. However, more subtle, often unintentional forms of systemic or institutional racism and discrimination continue to exist.”

So they’re not really talking about racist acts in the way most people think about them, like harassing people with racial epithets or outright violence. They’re referring to things like microaggressions.