In July 2025, Frank Paris, a 52-year-old Black man raised in Montreal, was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to trafficking cannabis and hash. However, with the help of his lawyer, who submitted a report outlining Paris’s experiences with systemic racism, the judge reduced his sentence from 35 to 24 months.
This style of report is known as an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment (IRCA). IRCAs offer a tactic for criminal justice professionals to inform judges of the effect of systemic discrimination on the offender, their life experiences, and, therefore, their experiences with the justice system. IRCAs are employed at the sentencing stage of trials and are often used to advocate for reduced sentences or alternatives to incarceration.
IRCAs represent a critical, anti-racist method to address the overrepresentation of Black individuals in the carceral system. By providing an opportunity for judges to reevaluate overly punitive sentences, courts are able to achieve justice outcomes that avoid further entrenching systemic racism in courts and prisons.
Paris’s case was the first time in Quebec that a judge had used an IRCA when determining a sentence for a Black offender. Paris’s IRCA outlined his experiences with systemic and interpersonal racism in Nova Scotia, where he spent most of his summers as a child. Nova Scotia is often referred to as ‘the deep south of Canada,’ home to the highest rate of hate crimes across the country and site of the destruction of Africville. The report also outlined several incidents in which Paris had faced overt racial discrimination, including a time when he was detained in a holding cell for immigrants despite being a Canadian citizen. Without an IRCA, the judge’s verdict would have neglected how these experiences shaped Paris’s relationship with the justice system.
Since 2021, the Government of Canada has offered substantial funding to support the implementation of IRCAs across the country, with these funds earmarked for training legal professionals who prepare IRCAs, professional development courses, and provincial costs associated with IRCAs.
However, in 2025, Quebec turned down federal funding for IRCAs, as Christopher Skeete, Quebec Minister Responsible for the Fight Against Racism, argued that IRCAs contradict a key aim of anti-racism: Equality under the law. According to Skeete, using race as a criterion by which to evaluate and determine justice outcomes is, in itself, an act of racism.
Yet Skeete’s analysis flattens the true purpose of policies like IRCAs: Not equality, not equity, but justice—collectively challenging the underlying social structures, power dynamics, and institutional practices that perpetuate injustice.
Affirmative action measures are instrumental in correcting systemic biases against marginalized groups. IRCAs do not represent the undue targeting of a racial minority. Instead, they facilitate the necessary and legitimate uplifting of Black Canadians, a group that colonial forces and the Government of Canada have systemically disadvantaged through over 200 years of slavery, decades of immigration restrictions, formal segregation in education, and still today, racism in the workplace, housing discrimination, overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, and police profiling.
Offering resources or making policy determinations based on ‘equality’ in a system that is inherently unequal merely maintains the systemically discriminatory status quo. Only through anti-racist, justice-based protocols can true equality within institutions like the criminal justice system be realized.
Yet denialist myths surrounding systemic racism in Quebec are disturbingly common. Quebec Premier François Legault has repeatedly asserted that systemic racism does not exist. The myth of Canadian exceptionalism still persists, under which it is asserted that Canada is a utopian, ‘raceless’ society that has escaped the rise of populism and white nationalism by virtue of its unique, multicultural nature. The Canadian census continues to manipulate and erase the concept of race from its surveys, leading not to a more equal society but to a shortage of the data necessary to inform its reconfiguration.
The use of an IRCA in Paris’s case has been subject to widespread backlash, including an incredibly hateful piece by La Presse columnist Patrick Lagacé, who called it “de la bullshit pour jus.” Yet these critics are not defending fairness; they are defending a status quo where systemic racism persists unchallenged. A justice system that refuses to see race is not neutral—it’s just more efficient at reproducing injustice.
