From Jan. 29 to March 8, 2026, a new exhibition at Montreal’s Sanaaq centre revisited the story of Gloria Baylis, a Black nurse who, in 1965, became the first person in Canada to successfully challenge racial discrimination in employment under the law. Baylis was denied a nursing position at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel after being falsely told that the position had been filled, which prompted her to bring the case forward under Quebec’s newly introduced Act Respecting Discrimination in Employment. She won.
Today, Gloria Baylis’ precedential case is commemorated as a turning point in Canadian law. However, the persistence of similar cases in the present reaffirms the limits of the Canadian system. While legal precedent now exists, the institutional frameworks used to assess and ‘counter’ racism continue to obscure its structural nature, making incidents of discrimination susceptible to dismissal as the government continues to operate under the guise of progress.
Although the $25 CAD penalty imposed on the Queen Elizabeth Hotel was symbolic, Baylis’s case offered undeniable proof that Canadian institutions could be held accountable under the law for racial discrimination in employment. The case also reshaped how discrimination could be publicly confronted. Prior to Baylis’s challenge, many Black individuals were reluctant to report discriminatory experiences, often fearing retaliation or believing that such claims would not be taken seriously. Following the ruling, more individuals came forward, allowing advocacy groups like the Negro Citizenship Association to document patterns of racial discrimination and build the case for watchdog agencies, such as the Federal Human Rights Commission and Quebec’s Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse (CDPDJ).
Yet, just over 60 years later, Wanda Kagan’s case is a reminder of the inadequacy of current legal frameworks to identify and address racial discrimination. After decades of working within Montreal’s public health system, Kagan filed a complaint with the CDPDJ, alleging that systemic racism had stalled her career advancement despite her qualifications and seniority.
However, the CDPDJ’s institutional design inherently constrains its ability to recognize and, by consequence, redress incidents of systemic racism. The CDPDJ does not provide clear public guidelines for how systemic racism in employment should be proven or dealt with, and such complaints are evaluated using the same standards as individual discrimination claims. In Kagan’s case, instrumental context—such as her race and the demographic composition of her workplace—was omitted from the commission’s statement of facts, minimizing a pattern of unequal treatment to a mere administrative ‘oversight.’
The limitations evident in Kagan’s case are not proper to a single complaint: They are part of a broader, recurring discrepancy in Quebec’s confrontation with systemic racism. Former Quebec Premier François Legault has repeatedly refused to formally acknowledge systemic racism as a fact of Quebec’s history and structural design. For example, the province refuses to consistently collect standardized, disaggregated, race-based data across employment or public institutions, making patterns of discrimination difficult to identify, and even harder to prove. Instead, complaints are assessed in isolation, reducing systemic racism to coincidental incidents that can be dismissed as irregularities instead of structural inequities that must be fundamentally addressed.
The aforementioned limitations in recognizing the full extent of systemic racism are also embedded within McGill itself. The University’s selective institutional memory celebrates its legacy of prestige while simultaneously minimizing the conditions of injustice upon which it was built. James McGill, the university’s founder, was a slave owner who amassed the majority of his wealth—which he then used to fund the creation of the school—through enslaved labour and the fur trade.
Throughout the 20th century, McGill imposed restrictions on admission and instituted barriers to medical training and hospital internships for Black students. These histories are rarely foregrounded or acknowledged in McGill’s narrative—instead, McGill continues to maintain and re-embed systemically racist structures on campus. In September 2025, the university dissolved the Faculty of Medicine’s main equity, diversity, and inclusion body. As of 2023, Black professors represented merely 1.6 per cent of McGill’s teaching staff, with only 4.4 per cent of the student body self-identifying as Black. McGill’s omission of its historical and current perpetuations of anti-Black racism is purposeful. This selective institutional memory shapes how inequality is understood in the present and how it will be addressed in the future.
To move beyond commemoration, Quebec must formally recognize systemic racism as a structural reality to be addressed at a foundational level. Institutions like McGill must move past selective remembrance and commit to transparent accountability and meaningful support for Black students and scholarship. Without using the knowledge of the past as a catalyst for change, McGill risks not just perpetuating, but promoting practices of inequality.