Discriminating in Plain Sight

I — The Citizenship Barrier

Quebec: the only province excluding permanent residents

Quebec is the only Canadian province that does not allow permanent residents to join its police forces. All other provinces, the RCMP, and the Canadian Armed Forces accept permanent residents.²

Section 115 of Quebec's Police Act³ requires that candidates for police positions be Canadian citizens. This requirement is codified in section 4 of the Regulation respecting the conditions for admission to the police profession⁴ (ENPQ regulation).

The 2021 Advisory Committee on Police Reality⁵ expressly recommended replacing the citizenship criterion with permanent resident status (recommendation 48). The same reform appeared in the government's own Bill 18.⁶ However, by the time Bill 14⁷ was tabled in 2023, the provision had vanished. Opposition MNAs pressed the Minister of Public Security to explain and reinstate it⁸, but he refused and could provide no explanation other than repeatedly stating that his government had increased the number of spots for minorities at the ENPQ — which was beside the point. Critics described this as a wall of silence, as the government backed away from a reform it had itself endorsed.⁹

The fact remains that the population excluded by this law is overwhelmingly racialized. These are permanent residents approved by the government, who work, pay taxes, and are rooted in their communities. They can be lawyers, doctors, or even politicians, but they are barred from policing solely because they have not yet obtained citizenship.

Under section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the citizenship requirement is vulnerable to a challenge grounded in discrimination based on national origin and disproportionate effect. It cannot satisfy the bona fide occupational requirement analysis: every other Canadian jurisdiction carries out its policing mission without this requirement, and Quebec has provided no pressing and substantial justification for maintaining it. Why?

II — A Constellation of Additional Obstacles

A constellation of additional obstacles

The swimming test

Quebec is also the only province to maintain a pass-or-fail swimming test as a condition for obtaining the DEC in Police Technology¹⁰ and as a prerequisite for admission to the ENPQ¹¹ — the college program that constitutes the main route of entry into the police profession. In 2015, the ENPQ itself stopped administering a swimming test as an admission criterion¹²; the burden was shifted to the cégeps, several of which maintain it as a pass-or-fail condition for graduation.

Operational justification is absent. The ENPQ program devotes three hours and fifteen minutes to a non-mandatory water-rescue component that does not require students to enter the water.¹³ The CNESST¹⁴ and Ville de Montréal¹⁵ directives impose a strict framework on the management of workplace drowning risk that governs the actions of SPVM officers. Then-Deputy Chief Jean-François Bernier of the SPVQ confirmed that aquatic interventions are "exceptional" and that the officers most comfortable in the water volunteer for them¹⁶ — yet a swimming test still conditions entry into the profession.

Studies show that swimming practice is conditioned by ethnicity and socioeconomic status.¹⁷ A pass-or-fail test on a skill with no demonstrated link to the police profession functions as a mechanism of indirect exclusion of racialized candidates. The framework established by the Supreme Court of Canada in Meiorin¹⁸ requires employers to demonstrate a bona fide occupational requirement for any uniform physical standard.

No such justification has been established here in Quebec, and I believe the requirement is vulnerable to challenge under both the Canadian and Quebec charters.

Academic selection and the AEC Diversity program: two doors, two standards

Candidates admitted to the DEC in Police Technology are selected primarily on the basis of academic excellence. To be admitted to Police Technology in Quebec, one must generally maintain a high school (DES) general average of at least 75% to 85%.¹⁹ Given that the CDPDJ has documented the existence of systemic discrimination in the Quebec education system²⁰, evaluating racialized candidates primarily on their grades reflects the accumulated effects of that discrimination rather than their actual capacity to practice the police profession.

The Advisory Committee on Police Reality even recommended a rebalanced admission formula: 40% academic grades, 40% emotional intelligence, 20% physical tests — with the demonstration of openness to cultural and social diversity as the paramount criterion.²¹ That recommendation was never implemented by the government.

Behind the academic selection criteria lies a structural contradiction embedded in recruitment itself. The AEC in Police Diversity. The AEC Diversity in Police Technology program has been offered since 1989 as an exceptional measure to respond to the specific recruitment needs of police organizations.²²

This program has produced significant results for women… who are white. The representation of women in the police profession has increased considerably since 1986, when they made up only 4% of police personnel.²³ In May 2024, the Sûreté du Québec reported that 28% of its officers were women.²⁴ Among the fifty municipal police services in Canada serving populations of 100,000 or more, Quebec services posted the highest proportion of female officers, with Longueuil leading at 35%, followed by Montreal at 33%.²⁵

In 1991, the Montreal Urban Community Police Service (SPCUM), in accordance with section 86.1 of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, officially launched its equal access to employment program.²⁶ The guiding principle of that program was that targeted groups should be present in the workforce in the same proportion as in the available labour force in the territory served by the Montreal police.

Today, the AEC has the declared mandate of integrating racialized and Indigenous candidates into police forces in proportion to their share in the population served. The program is reserved for these candidates — only racialized and Indigenous persons may apply.²⁷ However, before starting, candidates must hold a prior diploma from a Cégep and have a job offer from a police force. The AEC is therefore conditional on the goodwill of police institutions to increase their diversity.²⁸

The results confirm that this dependency is fatal to the program's mandate. In February 2024, Radio-Canada reported that the first AEC cohort at Cégep Garneau did not include a single student from minority backgrounds. The police forces responsible for recruitment had recruited none of the people for whom the program was created.²⁹

The standard three-year DEC pathway is even worse, and the numbers do not lie. AEC graduates account for only 8 to 9% of all new police technology students each year. Among standard DEC graduates entering the ENPQ, visible minorities represent 5 to 6%, ethnic minorities 2 to 3%, and Indigenous candidates 0.2% — that is, one or two people out of hundreds.³⁰

These figures are almost entirely concentrated in three cégeps in the Montreal region: Collège Ahuntsic, Collège de Maisonneuve, and John Abbott College. Outside Montreal, three-year DEC cohorts are almost entirely white.³¹ Diversity in Quebec policing is not a provincial achievement. It is a three-cégep phenomenon, and aggregated provincial statistics serve to conceal the extent of failure everywhere else. Once the specialized AEC streams are removed, the combined pipeline exceeds 90% young whites of European origin and "old-stock" Quebecers.

The gap appears even more clearly when comparing the AEC to the so-called "conventional" university pathway — open to all candidates regardless of race — which requires only a bachelor's degree, no prior job offer, and which handles 300 to 450 applications per year.³² That is twice the annual capacity of the AEC, without any of its filtering conditions. The program designed for racialized candidates has higher prerequisites, reduced capacity, and institutional dependence. The program open to all operates at scale with no constraint.

The ENPQ's internal data on non-traditional cohorts (AEC and conventional) confirm the pattern system-wide: visible minorities, 9%; ethnic minorities, 4%; Indigenous candidates, 4%; white candidates of European descent, 83%. So, in streams specifically designed to diversify the police, more than four out of five entrants are white. This is not a failure. It is the system producing exactly what its design was built to produce.

The AEC Diversity program has therefore existed for more than thirty-five years, and in fact, white women aspirants have benefited from it in the vast majority of cases. So women aspiring to become police officers can achieve their career goal either through the DEC in Police Technology or as "conventionals." The contrast with the representation of visible minorities is striking. The AEC is not a diversity achievement — it is a demographic survival system that maintains figures the standard stream cannot produce. Quebec created it because the DEC did not reflect urban demographic realities. Thirty-five years later, that is its sole function.

In fact, having spoken with several of them, racialized candidates who enter the profession through the AEC or "conventional" pathway face a documented hostile institutional culture at every stage: at the cégep, at the National Police Academy, and once they are in the ranks. They are regularly told they are "job stealers," that hiring criteria have been lowered for them, and that they have benefited from favouritism.

It is a sustained institutional message that their presence is illegitimate — a message that begins before the first day of training and follows them throughout their careers. The fundamental problem remains: programs designed to diversify the police cannot succeed as long as the institutional ecosystem — from the citizenship requirement to swimming tests to the hostile workplace culture — remains structurally unchanged.

Bill 21 and the ban on religious symbols

Finally, Bill 21, the Act respecting the laicity of the State (2019), prohibits state employees in positions of authority — including police officers — from wearing religious symbols in the exercise of their functions.³³ It tells Sikhs, observant Jews, Muslims, and members of other religious communities that the Quebec police is not for them.

Combined with the citizenship requirement, the swimming test, and the racialized academic selection criteria, Bill 21 completes an architecture of exclusion that operates simultaneously on the levels of citizenship, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background, and language of instruction.