What Erin O’Toole gets wrong about the faux-controversy over Netflix’s Cuties

2020/09/15 Leave a comment

Barry Hertz nails it. And how did O’Toole’s team revert to playing to the base after his initial, and positively reviewed, efforts to expand it. Did any one on his team actually see the film before drafting the tweet?:

I did not want to write this column. Or, more accurately, I did not think that I would have to write this column. But because newly elected Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole decided to send out a terribly ill-informed tweet Saturday afternoon, here I am, wasting my weekend writing about the new French film Cuties, currently streaming on Netflix.

“I’m a dad who is deeply disturbed by this Netflix show,” O’Toole tweeted. “Childhood is a time of innocence. We must do more to protect children. This show is exploitative and wrong.”

Last month, when Netflix unveiled a poster for Maïmouna Doucouré’s directorial debut, which the streaming service acquired after its premiere at January’s Sundance Film Festival, the company came under heavy social-media criticism for marketing that was creepily provocative, if not outright exploitative. Featuring a cadre of preteen girls in skin-tight, midriff-baring dance outfits placed in highly suggestive poses, Netflix’s poster not unfairly sparked concerns that it was sexualizing children.

Yet one marketing mess does not mean Netflix is suddenly trafficking in child porn, which is what an increasingly vocal group of right-leaning U.S. commentators seem to suggest.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri this past Friday issued an openletter to Netflix co-chief executive officer Reed Hastings, saying that Cutiesdepicts “children being coached to engage in simulated sexual acts, for cameras both onscreen and off. Your decision to [stream the film] raises major questions of child safety and exploitation.”

Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted the same day that Netflix is “aggressively promoting new movie sexualizing children. Hollywood should not be celebrating & making $$ off of the sexual abuse of 11-year-old girls. This is not OK.” And then there are the denunciations from such American publications as The Daily Caller and Breitbart, which have sparked a #CancelNetflix social-media surge.

Noticing the discourse south of the border the past week, I thought to leave well enough alone. It was clear from the froth and spittle being spent on Cuties outrage that most of those who were calling for Netflix’s head had not bothered to actually watch the film. If they did, and if they spent just one minute to think about Doucouré’s cinematic intent, they would have discovered that the movie excoriates the very thing they claim it propagates.

Cuties is a nuanced, tender and powerful coming-of-age story. Focusing on a young Senegalese child named Amy (Fathia Youssouf) who is torn between her devotion to her religious family and her desire to fit in with her secular Parisian friends, Cuties is a clear indictment of the choices that contemporary society forces upon young girls. Pressured by peers and myriad outside forces to sexualize themselves far too early, Amy and her friends fall into a trap of faux self-actualization. Eventually, Amy comes to the realization that speeding up her adulthood through provocative clothing and twerking is no substitute for the bonds of family, and the innocence of childhood.

Is the film at times uncomfortable to watch? Definitely, which is how Doucouré conveys her central message. By getting under her audience’s skin, by making them question what Amy goes through on-screen, the filmmaker is asking viewers to consider their own role in what society demands of its youth. Ultimately, it comes down to a guiding philosophy of art: depiction does not equate endorsement.

For their part, Netflix quickly scrapped its truly terrible poster and offered a mea culpa, with the company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos apologizing directly to Doucouré for so badly misadvertising her work. But marketing and the content that is being marketed are two very different things – a distinction that evades the current outrage machine.

Still, I naively assumed that the increasingly ludicrous debate was a distinctly American problem. Canadian readers didn’t need to be dragged into the muck. But then on Saturday came the tweet from O’Toole, who apparently has nothing better to do during a pandemic than stoke a culture war with misleading embers.

I am willing to eat my hat, live-streamed on this very website, if O’Toole has actually spent the 96 minutes it takes to watch Cuties. If he has, then his tweet suggests that he has spent exactly zero seconds thinking about it – or, worse yet, that perhaps he does not retain the capacity to think critically about anything. (Given the fact that he twice refers to Cuties as a “show” and not a movie only emboldens my hat-eating gambit.)

Either way, O’Toole’s decision to latch onto the issue reveals a disturbing vision of what he thinks the Conservative Party of 2020 should be spending its time on. It is a false controversy, spread by either ignorance or willful manipulation, helped along in certain U.S. corners by the QAnon conspiracy movement, a subculture so mired in stupidity that I won’t waste another sentence on it in this column.

As of this writing, O’Toole’s tweet has more than 700 retweets and 2,000 favourites. I shudder to think how far its faux outrage might spread come Monday morning.

But just as I’m arguing that you shouldn’t listen to O’Toole, I’ll also admit that you don’t have to listen to me, either. Queue up Cuties on Netflix, and think for yourself.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/article-what-erin-otoole-gets-wrong-about-the-faux-controversy-over-netflixs/

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Data shows an increase in anti-Asian hate incidents in Canada since onset of pandemic

2020/09/15 Leave a comment

Although collected through online portals with anonymity, of concern and buttressed by official police stats:

More than 600 incidents of hate targeting Asians within Canada have been reported to Chinese Canadian groups since the pandemic began, and one in three of those attacks have been assaults, say the groups.

The data, collected through online portals that have allowed victims to report hate incidents anonymously, are consistent with reports from Canadian police forces that they are also investigating an increase in anti-Asian attacks.

The data, released last week, were compiled by the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter, Project 1907, the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice. All of the incidents were reported through two online platforms based in Toronto or Vancouver. The reports were received from seven provinces.

Justin Kong, executive director for the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter, said the data again indicate Asian Canadians have been targeted through the pandemic and racism will continue to taint Canada until there are policies in place to tackle it.

“Those attacks stemmed from historical anti-Asian racism, but also because of the ways in which COVID-19 has been racialized,” he said, adding COVID-19 is seen as a Chinese disease, similar to SARS.

“We saw what happened during SARS, and I guess it became obvious that this was going to go the same way. … That’s why we started collecting the data on the racist attacks.”

Mr. Kong acknowledged they weren’t able to verify the reports, and the groups instead have been relying on “a trust system.”

The data, which have been collected since February, show that 83 per cent of the incidents were reported by East Asians, followed by 7 per cent by Southeast Asians. It says 44 per cent of the attacks were reported from B.C. – the highest in Canada – while 38 per cent of the occurrences were reported in Ontario and 7 per cent in Quebec.

Women reported 60 per cent of all incidents. In B.C., women were even more disproportionately affected, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of all reported incidents there.

The data found nearly 30 per cent of reported incidents are assault, including targeted coughing, physical attacks and violence, and that verbal harassment is the most common type of discrimination.

These groups’ findings echo those of the Vancouver Police Department, which has reported a dramatic rise in hate incidents against East Asians.

In July, Vancouver police said they have had 66 hate-motivated incidents against East Asian people reported to them so far in 2020, a huge spike from the seven during the same period last year. A VPD spokesperson said the most targeted community continues to be East Asian.

Toronto Police Service spokeswoman Connie Osborne said, in comparison to 2019, her force has seen an increase in the number of hate-motivated occurrences, including where race has been a factor.

She said many of the 2020 cases are active investigations and the motivation of the offence may change or more offences may be uncovered, so the force can’t provide specific numbers for the year so far. But she added such incidents often go unreported and the number of reports received by police are not an accurate reflection of what people have experienced.

Earlier this year, Korean Montrealer Kyungseo Min compiled testimonies from Asian Québécois of racist incidents since January. In the span of about a month and a half, Ms. Min collected more than 20.

She said some of her findings match those from the advocacy groups. For example, female Asians reported more harassment or violence than men, and the majority of the racism was verbal.

In Alberta, the Alberta Hate Crimes Committee has been running the StopHateAB.ca portal since 2017 to encourage people to report incidents and talk about what happened to them. The portal’s reports include four incidents reported this year of an East Asian Canadian being verbally assaulted in a public space in a tirade related to COVID-19.

Since it began collecting data, the portal has logged 74 incidents of hate in Edmonton, 69 in Calgary and 31 in Lethbridge. There are a handful of reports from other areas of the province. The data were last updated in July.

The groups are calling on the federal government to include an anti-racism strategy in its postpandemic recovery plan.

Mr. Kong said as the pandemic has posed more challenges to racialized communities, he hopes that the government could also come up with policies aimed at helping migrant workers and low-income immigrant workers.

The House of Commons’ standing committee on justice and human rights issued a report just more than a year ago with recommendations for battling online hate. They include recommendations for more funding for police, judges and Crown prosecutors to enable them to better respond to hate complaints as well as better data collection on hate incidents.

The report, submitted in June, 2019, noted a 50-per-cent jump in hate crimes targeting Black people in 2017 relative to the year earlier. However, the report does not refer to hate crimes against those of East Asian descent.

In a response this month, the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Toronto-based foundation, provided several recommendations to the Justice Minister’s office, including placing online hate crimes under federal jurisdiction and developing a more clear and comprehensive definition of illegal hate activities.

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, the foundation’s director of policy, said it is the responsibility of the justice system to recognize hatred as the poison that it is and confront hate crimes.

“We want to see all hate crimes aggressively investigated by police, regardless of what community is being targeted and what form these crimes take, so that perpetrators are brought to justice.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-data-shows-an-increase-in-anti-asian-hate-incidents-in-canada-since/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Morning%20Update&utm_content=2020-9-14_6&utm_term=Morning%20Update:%20Isolation%20and%20loneliness%20take%20a%20toll%20on%20mental%20health%20during%20pandemic%20&utm_campaign=newsletter&cu_id=%2BTx9qGuxCF9REU6kNldjGJtpVUGIVB3Y

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Sunnybrook Hospital pledged to ‘listen’ to employees about discrimination. Two workers say they’ve been speaking out about racism for years — and nothing has been done

2020/09/15 Leave a comment

These types of stories continue to emerge from many organizations:

Angela Lindow, a part-time worker at Sunnybrook Hospital, received a company-wide email in June after George Floyd’s killing and the resulting racial unrest. The hospital was committing to “address inequity,” “eliminate racism,” and “listen.” She thought, “Listen? We’ve been right here for years.”

Lindow and 11 other racialized Sunnybrook employees in the communications department, which co-ordinates calls made to the hospital and activates emergency response teams by managing codes, first made allegations of systemic racism in their hospital department in January 2016. Some have still been fighting through multiple channels to get a satisfying response from the hospital.

The original allegations pointed to instances of discrimination in hiring decisions, discrimination in decisions to reorganize shifts, changes that seemed to remove racialized staff from visitor-facing positions to less visible work locations and unequal accommodation and treatment between white staff and racialized staff.

The workers brought these complaints to management, and a five-month external investigation concluded that each claim was “unsubstantiated” with no further explanation in the summary provided to them.

After the investigation concluded, the staff filed claims with the Human Rights Tribunal in July 2016. This fall, they are expected to have a summary hearing. From there, it will be decided if the applicants have enough evidence to move on to a full hearing.

Emily Shepherd, a lawyer who works at Human Rights Legal Support Centre which is representing Lindow, said generally, racial discrimination and systemic racism cases can be difficult to prove because the instances, often, are not overt. It’s not uncommon for complex cases like this to take a long time to go through the process, Shepherd said.

The remaining complainants are hoping to receive monetary compensation for pain, suffering and lost wages, as well as have the hospital form an anti-racism department and new practices for dealing with discrimination cases.

The Star asked Sunnybrook about the original 19 allegations, the internal investigation and the current Human Rights Tribunal cases. The hospital responded with a written statement that said Sunnybrook is following the tribunal’s process and that the original complaints “were addressed in accordance with the hospital’s policies.”

The statement went on to say that “Sunnybrook has a number of policies specific to ensuring a safe and respectful work environment and one that is free from harassment, discrimination and violence. Sunnybrook takes any allegation of this nature seriously.”

Like many organizations, Sunnybrook has internally made commitments to address racism and diversity issues within the hospital, but Lindow is still disappointed, especially with the work racialized staff have contributed throughout this pandemic. She felt dismissed when these complaints were originally filed and again now, while trying to have the hospital revisit the issue.

Janet Getten, who has worked at Sunnybrook since 1989, was one of the complainants. She has found the process of trying to be heard demoralizing.

Despite waiting for years for this fall’s hearing, Lindow and Getten, as well as some of the others they say, still feel the need to pursue it.

“I want the hospital to acknowledge that we were treated badly,” Lindow said. Especially during a time where COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting Black and brown people, she says it’s all the more important for the hospital internally to address cases of inequality.

Getten had nothing but positive things to say about the quality of care Sunnybrook has the capacity for, but emphasized that the hospital should still address how she, and other racialized staff, were treated.

“Amazing people work at this hospital,” Getten said. “But they’re not always treated fairly.”

For Lindow this is true not only for them as staff, but the patient care. “This is a structural, systemic issue” and she wonders if racialized staff is treated like this, how can racialized patients feel “confident” that they will “receive equal treatment” from the hospital.

“The tone is set from the top. The CEOs, the executives,” Lindow said. “This was a huge case that [the hospital] continues to ignore.”

Much of the complaints from 2016 had to do with staff being passed over for new positions for which they were qualified, based on documents reviewed by the Star.

As a unionized job, current employees with seniority and qualifications can often change roles with ease. Four of the complaints involved racialized staff members who were passed over for new roles and instead either external applicants or applicants with lower seniority, who were white, were hired.

In 2015, Getten applied for a position at St. John’s campus as a front desk operator. A typing test requirement was added, which Lindow and Getten say was not usual for internal applicants given the experience they already had within the department. Getten had been working at Sunnybrook for over 20 years at that point, and said in her time she had trained other staff and covered for section leaders.

Despite her experience, Getten’s typing score was below what was listed as required in the posting and she was not granted an interview at all. Instead, the job was given to a recently hired white co-worker. The same white co-worker was also mentioned another time in the complaints, when management granted her a position over a racialized man, who successfully grieved the seniority issue with the union and was given the position.

A former section leader in the department who spoke with the Star under the condition of anonymity, said that he had conversations with the hiring manager and shared Getten’s typing ability and practice test scores with the manager. Afterwards, the job was posted with a requirement that was out of Getten’s range.

Getten has since transferred to another campus at Sunnybrook, but the circumstances around losing out on that last job due to typing ability “still hurts,” she said.

The same section leader, who is a white man, was originally hired externally as a call operator. When he applied for the section leader position, he said the same manager cited in the complaint about the typing requirement gave him the opportunity to write his own job description for the role, and told him to include criteria that only he could meet. By doing this, it would result in excluding current staff with seniority from being successful at applying, including Lindow who was also interested in the role.

Several attempts by the Star to reach the manager in question went unanswered.

In addition to this instance, Lindow alleges in the Human Rights Tribunal claim that she was passed over for another management position in 2015. Lindow started working at Sunnybrook after being a stay-at-home mother for a number of years since it was walking distance from home and would be a path to re-enter the workforce. She applied for a management position after working as a part-time operator for a year and with previous experience working in emergency management as well as the anti-racism secretariat for the Ontario government. An external white male applicant was hired instead.

In 2015 under the new management, shift times were changed, making the overnight shifts start at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. rather than 11 p.m., so that there would be more overlap between operators in the morning. While shift changes are said to align with call volume and help mitigate absences, Lindow says that since much of the staff is older racialized women who do not drive, these times posed safety issues for them and would ultimately impact whether they could stay with the job. She also says the shift changes were only implemented at the Bayview campus, not other campuses where staff was predominately white.

Another staff person with over 25 years of experience had her schedule changed and was required to work every weekend, rather than alternating weekends. The employee worked a second job, and as a result of the new schedule, had to change her work status from permanent part-time to casual in order to maintain both jobs, which made her lose out on seniority and pension contributions, the original claim alleges.

Combined, these work changes and lack of job mobility felt like an attempt to force out racialized employees while hiring more white staff in the department, Lindow said, which is why they filed complaints as a group.

Thinking back to hearing that the claims were unsubstantiated after the external investigation, Lindow said, “At the end of the day, you had 12 racialized people go to their white manager and say, something’s amiss here. We’re feeling the weight of discrimination. All white people investigate and come back and say, there’s nothing to see here.”

“You really do hope that they would have looked at it and said, ‘All of this, all of these things are happening. Let’s pick this up and really look into it because 19 of these things happened,’” Getten said. “How is it possible to find that it was their opinion or decision that none of these things happened?”

Lindow continued, “If management treats us like this, how is a Black patient supposed to feel confident?”

Eight of the staffers including Lindow and Getten took the cases to the Human Rights Tribunal in July 2016. Two complainants have since abandoned their cases, so as of now, six continue to await a hearing.

When going through the Tribunal process, cases first go through a summary hearing stage, which is the stage this case is awaiting in the fall. This is when the Tribunal hears some points of the case and decides whether to move forward with a full hearing where evidence will be heard in detail.

Shepherd, the lawyer familiar with Lindow and Getten’s tribunal claim, said for cases of systemic discrimination, a chance to present all the evidence is best.

“Dismissing it at that early stage actually, for cases with those types of allegations, often isn’t appropriate, because it doesn’t give the tribunal [the opportunity] to look at the full picture,” she said. “And often you need the full picture to really assess these kinds of allegations.”

Source: Sunnybrook Hospital pledged to ‘listen’ to employees about discrimination. Two workers say they’ve been speaking out about racism for years — and nothing has been done

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Zhenhua Data leak: personal details of millions around world gathered by China tech company

2020/09/15 Leave a comment

Of note – the broad and extensive reach (one of the better articles). Would be wonderful to see the Canadian list to see how far it extends:

The personal details of millions of people around the world have been swept up in a database compiled by a Chinese tech company with reported links to the country’s military and intelligence networks, according to a trove of leaked data.

About 2.4 million people are included in the database, assembled mostly based on public open-source data such as social media profiles, analysts said. It was compiled by Zhenhua Data, based in the south-eastern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

Internet 2.0, a cybersecurity consultancy based in Canberra whose customers include the US and Australian governments, said it had been able to recover the records of about 250,000 people from the leaked dataset, including about 52,000 Americans, 35,000 Australians and nearly 10,000 Britons. They include politicians, such as prime ministers Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison and their relatives, the royal family, celebrities and military figures.

When contacted by the Guardian for comment, a representative of Zhenhua said: “The report is seriously untrue.”

“Our data are all public data on the internet. We do not collect data. This is just a data integration. Our business model and partners are our trade secrets. There is no database of 2 million people,” said the representative surnamed Sun, who identified herself as head of business.

“We are a private company,” she said, denying any links to the Chinese government or military. “Our customers are research organisations and business groups.”

The database was leaked to American academic Christopher Balding, who was previously based in Shenzhen but has returned to the US because of security concerns. He shared the data with Internet 2.0 for recovery and analysis. The findings were first published on Monday by a consortium of media outlets including the Australian Financial Review and the Daily Telegraph in the UK.

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

How “Prerequisite Cases” Tried to Define Whiteness

2020/09/14 Leave a comment

Some interesting history:

Codified in 1790, U.S. law said being a “free white person” was a prerequisite for naturalization. But how did courts define “white” as more and more people sought citizenship?

For Black immigrants, the question was settled by the Naturalization Act of 1870, which allowed “aliens of African nativity” and “persons of African descent” to apply for citizenship. (The law also revoked the citizenship of naturalized Chinese immigrants.) The references to nativity and descent seemed to offer a working definition of who was Black. But between 1878 and 1952, there were at least fifty-two court cases in the United States that tried to define who was white.

In these “prerequisite cases,” writes scholar John Tehranian, individuals sued to be “declared white by law after being denied citizenship rights by immigration authorities on the grounds of racial ineligibility.” Precedent could whipsaw back and forth: A Syrian, for instance, was declared white in 1909; another Syrian was declared not white in 1913; still another wasn’t white in 1914; then, in 1915, a fourth was legally found to be white.

For Irish, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Slavs, Arabs, and other nationalities and ethnicities, whiteness was a gray zone. According to Tehranian, this meant that prerequisite cases “had a profound impact on shaping the immigrant experience in the United States.” Since whiteness could lead to citizenship, and therefore rights, privileges, and political power, the stakes were high.

Tehranian explores how courts used different tests to define whiteness through the 1920s. There was a “scientific evidence” test, which proved itself to be not vey scientific. And there was the “common knowledge” test, simple “common sense”—which is never all that simple.

It was, for instance, “scientific” that Takao Ozawa couldn’t be included in the category “white persons” because he was not “Caucasian” (Ozawa v. U.S., 1922). But being Caucasian per se wasn’t necessarily enough to be white, either, as Bhagat Singh Thind discovered in 1923. Thind was an India-born Sikh who served in the U.S. Army during World War I; he claimed Aryan descent, meaning membership in the Caucasian race. The Supreme Court abandoned the supposedly scientific arguments it had used just a year earlier and ruled him ineligible for whiteness and therefore citizenship. It was common sense to a majority of justices that a “heathen” couldn’t be white.

Tehranian argues that after Ozawa and Thind, a new test for racial determination took hold. Whiteness became a matter of “white performance interpreted through the eyes of judges.” A petitioner could first “point to his own adoption of white values and his personal dramaturgy of whiteness as evidence of his appropriate racial categorization.” A second piece of evidence was “the assimilation of his ethnic group into the core Western European, Christian tradition as evidence of his whiteness.”

Armenians, for instance, were declared white in U.S. v. Cartozian (1925), based on several factors. Their Christianity became “a proxy for racial belonging.” An expert witness for the court personally knew of “ten or fifteen Armenians in Boston who had married American wives.” So worshiping in a Christian church and marrying white people were signifiers of being white.

A 1952 law finally did away with the race-based system of naturalization. Quotas put in place in the 1920s to limit immigration from non–Western European countries were abandoned in 1965. But in the late 1990s, California courts still recognized the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid groupings of humanity that had been invented in the late eighteenth century by German historians.

Race may be a social construct, but it still seems not everyone has gotten the message.

Source: https://daily.jstor.org/how-prerequisite-cases-tried-to-define-whiteness/?utm_term=How%20%2526ldquo%3BPrerequisite%20Cases%2526rdquo%3B%20Tried%20to%20Define%20Whiteness&utm_campaign=jstordaily_09102020&utm_content=email&utm_source=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email

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Glavin: Don’t show up at Black Lives Matter rallies in clothes made by slaves

2020/09/12 Leave a comment

While much of Glavin’s commentary is appropriate, he overstates IMO the contrast between the USA and Canada, given that all the big companies he lists as being complicit, have a large American retail presence with comparable sourcing issues. Not too mention Disney’s Mulan shot in Xinjiang.

So while American laws may be better, is the reality?

It’s positively uplifting, you could say, that owing to the protests and riots and presidential election-year shouting about systemic racism and police violence in the United States, quite a few Canadians seem to have developed an acutely attentive awareness of the history of Black slavery in America and its enduring legacy. Perhaps not so heartwarming is that the throngs of earnest protesters turning out for all those Black Lives Matter rallies across Canada are wearing clothes made by slaves.

That Canadians of even the most advanced progressive sophistication give every appearance of being completely oblivious to this ugly irony is even less uplifting. An entire summer of American-style protests about the wickedness of racism and capitalism has come and gone without any obvious notice that Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Adidas, Esprit, Calvin Klein, Nike, UNIQLO, H&M, Lacoste and quite a few other globe-spanning corporations are demonstrably implicated in slavery, child labour, and forced-labour production in prisons and detention centres and sweatshops from Dhaka to Urumqi.

In July, the International Confederation of Trade Unions joined with 180 human rights and Uyghur advocacy organizations to launch an ambitious campaign to bring all this to light and to bring forced Uyghur labour to an end. It’s hard to say whether the campaign has gained much traction. Perhaps they should pull down some statues.

At least the U.S. Congress has been doing its bit. The bipartisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would build on existing U.S. prohibitions on the import of slave-made goods, and the proposed Slave-Free Business Certification Act is an even tougher law, promising penalties of up to $500 million.

Canadians, however – for all our boasts about being unstained by the original American sin of slavery – have long been global laggards in the cause of slavery’s abolition. Unlike the United States, Britain, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, Norway and so on, Canada has no specific legislation aimed at banning the import of goods produced by forced labour. World Vision Canada reckons that forced labour or child labour is implicated in $34 billion in products imported into Canada annually.

It is doubly embarrassing – maybe this is why it’s been the subject of nearly no public notice at all – that it’s taking the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the deal that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, to drag Canada into the world’s anti-slavery camp. Effective July 1, USMCA requires Canada to amend the Customs tariff laws to impose prohibitions on the importation of goods produced wholly or in part by forced labour.The USMCA’s forced-labour provisions should be expected to put wind in the sails of an effort by Liberal MP John McKay and Quebec Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that has been marooned in a procedural tidepool of committee hearings and on-again, off-again consultations for two years. Their proposed law, the Modern Slavery Act, would force corporations to show that their supply chains are free of forced labour, on pain of fines of up to $250,000.

Because the Americans were already in compliance with the UMSCA’s forced-labour provisions, on July 1 they hit the ground running. U.S. law already allows for the seizure of goods and criminal charges for violators, and just this week, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency was preparing to block imports of cotton from Xinjiang, where almost all of China’s cotton fields are located. One in five garments worldwide contains cotton from Xinjiang.

The U.S. import bans are expected to also include tomato products and human hair, and computer parts from Hefei Bitland Information Technology. Products from the Lop County Industrial Park and Lop County No. 4 Vocational Skills Education and Training Center are headed for banned list, following the July 1 seizure of several tons of hair extensions shipped to the U.S. believed to have been “harvested” from Uyghur women by the Lop County Meixin Hair Products Company. The U.S. State Department has also warned Walmart, Amazon and the Apple corporation that they face severe legal risks over their supply chains associated with Xinjiang.

According to the Walk Free Foundation’s 2018 Global Slavery Index, Canada is vulnerable to slave-labour contamination in supply chains involving nearly $10 billion worth of laptop computers and mobile phones annually imported from China and Malaysia, and $6 billion worth of apparel imports. Several other supply chains are suspect, including gold from Peru and sugarcane from Brazil.

While Canada has been noticeably absent in the global struggle against slavery, there is one Canadian bright spot, involving a particularly grotesque Canadian embarrassment.

The bright spot: Last March, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that three Eritrean refugees could sue the Vancouver-based mining company Nevsun Resources for engaging in slavery and committing crimes against humanity at the notorious Bisha gold, copper and zinc mine in Eritrea, co-owned by Nevsun and the Eritrean dictatorship. The three plaintiffs in the case say they were conscripted into the military and forced to work at the mine for 11, 14 and 17 years respectively, and that they were tortured and made to put in 12-hour days, sometimes seven days a week.

The embarrassment: Four years ago, when a UN commission of inquiry confirmed reports of abuse at the mine so grotesque as to amount to crimes against humanity, it turned out that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board owned 1.5 million shares of Bevsun Resources. In 2018, Nevsun’s shareholders agreed to sell the company for $1.86 billion to China’s Zijin Mining Group.

Perhaps Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should take a knee.

Source: Glavin: Don’t show up at Black Lives Matter rallies in clothes made by slaves

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Commentary: The Claremont Institute and Trump’s Politics of White Fear

2020/09/12 Leave a comment

More useful background on the anti-immigration zealots:

An hour east of Hollywood, where America’s cultural fetish for stories of apocalypse and antiheroes is made, the Claremont Institute lies in a nondescript beige building in the Pomona Valley. Created in 1979 to educate a new generation of conservative leaders through the study and reinterpretation of the American founding, the think tank has long peddled dystopian delusions, including that the U.S. faces an existential threat from a “Third World” invasion; that diversity “dissolves” the country’s unity; and that the many-headed monster of “wokeness,” “identity politics,” and “multiculturalism” seeks to “destroy the American way of life.”

“The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” buttoned-up president Ryan Williams, who has been with the institute since 2005, declares in a welcome video on the Claremont’s YouTube page. “We’ve always aimed high.”

The institute was founded by students of the political scientist Harry Jaffa, who in the 1960s helped radicalize the Republican Party through his participation in the presidential campaign of the right-wing zealot Barry Goldwater, writing the lines of his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Jaffa was a prolific author and scholar of Abraham Lincoln and other founders. He likened “political correctness” to Leninism and Stalinism.

The Claremont Institute, which has no affiliation with the Claremont colleges, publishes the Claremont Review of Books and awards fellowships to applicants interested in studying the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other founding documents. Last year, it awarded a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, a Pizzagate conspiracy theorist with ties to neo-fascist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The institute teaches and publishes new takes on America’s founding that whitewash history, insisting that the country was never racist and that those who argue otherwise seek to annihilate the United States. The mission statement says it seeks to “restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.” Its scholars launder white supremacist ideas through the language of heritage and the self-aware performance of erudition.

Most recently, Claremont Institute helped perpetuate the racist birther lie that Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t a legitimate American citizen. Senior fellow John C. Eastman wrote the debunked article in Newsweekquestioning Harris’s citizenship with his tortured reading of the Constitution. The institute has long challenged birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Newsweek editors have since apologized for the op-ed, albeit after saying it had “nothing to do with racist birtherism.” Notably, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer is a former fellow of the institute. Trump refused to condemn the birther lie, calling Eastman “brilliant” and saying he won’t be “pursuing” the theory but adding, “You would’ve thought [Harris] would’ve been vetted by Sleepy Joe.”

It is no accident that the white supremacist fantasies buttressing Trump’s reelection campaign were born in Los Angeles County. The region gave us Trump’s chief advisor and top speechwriter, Stephen Miller, whose parents have donated to the Claremont Institute and whose indoctrination in white supremacist ideas I report on in my book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda. Miller’s father Michael is a former Democrat who veered right in his politics after troubles with his real estate company led him to complain of the “ridiculous liberal elite” and their intrusion into his personal and business affairs, according to his brother-in-law David Glosser and others who knew him. He complained that universities were all controlled by left-wing extremists, a view espoused by the Claremont Institute.

California revealed the political utility of white fear for the state’s Republican Party in the ‘90s of Miller’s youth, when non-Hispanic white people became a minority in the state, triggering a backlash with bipartisan attacks on bilingual education, affirmative action and more. In 1994, deeply unpopular Republican Governor Pete Wilson won reelection by blaming all of the state’s problems on a migrant “invasion.” Proposition 187, launched that year in Orange County by people fearing a “Third World” takeover, targeted social services for undocumented migrants, including public school for migrant children. (The prop was later found unconstitutional).

In his 1996 book The Coming White Minority, Dale Maharidge—a professor of journalism at Columbia University—predicted of California: “The depth of white fear is underestimated … these anxieties will blow east like a bad Pacific storm as whites are outnumbered in other parts of the country.”

The wind that blew the white fear east came from think tanks like the Claremont Institute, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and other groups funded by the Scaife Foundations that helped give white supremacist ideas a pseudo-intellectual air and an exciting cinematic veneer by casting them as the “light” side in a battle between light and dark forces. Located in Sherman Oaks,  the David Horowitz Freedom Center is led by David Horowitz, Miller’s lifelong mentor, who says liberals pose “an existential threat” to the country because of their allyship with Muslims and others. Both the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Claremont Institute co-sponsored an event this April to bring the Dutch politician and Islamophobe Geert Wilders to Chapman University and screen a film painting Muslims as a danger to civilization. Both think tanks deny the existence of systemic racism against dark-skinned people while at the same time arguing that multiculturalism is deadly to America. The Claremont Institute’s podcast cheekily debates the merits of eugenics, and features a clip from the band Imagine Dragons’ song “Monster”: “I’m taking a stand to escape what’s inside me: a monster, a monster…and it keeps getting stronger!”

Members of California’s far right seem to revel in their antihero status. When I visited the Claremont Institute last year, president Ryan Williams told me conservatives like him see human nature as fixed and flawed, unlike liberals who see it as “perfectible.” The policies they support reflect their pessimistic view of humankind. They see themselves as clear-eyed warriors in a dystopian drama, living out the white supremacist conspiracy theory that says brown and Black people are replacing whites and endangering civilization. This false notion of white genocide, or the “great replacement theory,” has motivated self-styled heroes to commit acts of white terrorism, such as the massacre of 23 people in El Paso, Texas, last summer.

California has also bred commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, whose Hollywood-style apocalypse-mongering was noted with appreciation by the Claremont Institute: “[Republicans] would do well to follow Tucker Carlon’s lead. Night after night, in appropriately apocalyptic terms, Tucker explains the revolution,” the chairman of the Claremont Institute’s board, Thomas D. Klingenstein, told Orange County conservatives in August. Carlson has called himself a “libertarian right-winger,” which is how Miller identified in college.

In California, the myth of rugged, rigid, ruthless individualism that feeds right-wing libertarianism is trafficked like a drug alongside similarly addictive dystopian fantasies that inflate self-importance. Miller recently tried to justify the use of federal forces to crack down on antiracist protesters by telling Carlson on his show, “This is about the survival of this country and we will not back down.”

California conservatives like Miller and Tucker Carlson have mastered the art of conflating people of color and their allies with welfare-guzzling criminals: dog whistling, demonizing, and declaring doomsday in response to anything threatening the dominance of white men. The birther lie attacking Senator Harris is rooted in apocalyptic racism, as is Trump’s immigration agenda.

Miller’s immigration policies come from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigration think tank created by John Tanton, a white nationalist who believed in population control for non-white people and led successful efforts in California to mandate English as the official language. Tanton, who passed away in 2019, sought to coordinate attacks on affirmative action with Frederick R. Lynch, whose article “Immigration Nightmares,” was published by the Claremont Review of Books in 2003, arguing that California was turning into “Mexifornia.” Tanton also published an English translation of a novel about the destruction of the white world by subhuman brown refugees, The Camp of the Saints, which spoke to Miller and which he promoted through Breitbart in 2015.

It’s important to connect the dots between the White House and California’s long legacy of white supremacy to demonstrate that Trumpism is not an aberration but rather the culmination of long-fueled politics of hate. In 1991, when Miller was five years old in his home city of Santa Monica in 1991, hundreds of families with Hispanic surnames received a letter in their mailboxes that appeared to be from the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District headquarters. It featured the district’s bulk-mail permit number and address labels. Inside was a typed, one-page hate screed. The author said Mexicans were making the community unsafe and using up welfare. It called Mexicans “brown animals” and read: “We’ll gas you like Hitler gassed the Jews.”

The screed denied the existence of racism among white people and accused Mexicans of being “the real racists.” It singled out Mexican American Santa Monica High School alumnus Oscar de la Torre, alleging that he had been elected student body president the previous year because he was Mexican. “Why should there be a double standard for these wild beasts?” the letter asked. It called for a boycott of Mexican celebrations such as Cinco de Mayo, and of the student group MEChA, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán. The letter said Mexicans “infest our community with gays and lesbians.” It encouraged them to put on bulletproof vests and get ready for the gun battle.

De la Torre was 19 at the time, and his family received the screed under the letterhead of a “Samohi Assn. for the Advancement of Conservative White Americans” (Samohi is a nickname for Santa Monica High School). De la Torre called for an investigation of the hate crime. Police said they suspected someone in the school was responsible, but the crime remains unsolved three decades later. A public records request turned up a single police report. In an interview last year, de la Torre told me the lack of a resolution is indicative of how Santa Monica leaders felt, and feel, about racism. “Put it under the rug, let’s not talk about it,” he says.

In 2001, ten years after the letter was distributed, de la Torre was a counselor at Samohi and co-chaired a committee on equality. Stephen Miller, then a teenager, showed up to one of the first meetings. “Racism does not exist,” de la Torre says Miller told him. According to de la Torre, Miller also said the school was excusing black and Hispanic misbehavior by holding those students to a lower standard. Miller became a regular at the meetings, arguing against bilingual education, Spanish-language announcements, and multicultural activities such as Cinco de Mayo celebrations. He reportedly said the club for gay people was ruining the school.

It didn’t escape de la Torre that Miller’s rhetoric echoed that 1991 hate letter. Miller came to personify the nameless author who had haunted de la Torre for years.

“Stephen Miller did not invent that ideology,” he says. “He learned it from somewhere. And the person who wrote that letter also learned it. These feelings that divide our country, they exist, they can morph, they can grow.”

Jean Guerrero’s book, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, is on stands now.

Source: Commentary: The Claremont Institute and Trump’s Politics of White Fear

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Douglas Todd: Renowned sculptor touts ‘shock’ rebuttal to, not destruction of, historical statues

2020/09/12 Leave a comment

Yet another piece on sculptures and monuments of historical figures, with a similar sensible take to Tom McMahon’s Enough with John A. Macdonald. Where Are the Indigenous Monuments?:

Since he sees himself as a creator rather than a destroyer, one of Canada’s most renowned sculptors says his heart is broken almost every time another supposedly permanent public statue is vandalized, beheaded or toppled.

Timothy Schmalz, whose large figurative pieces are on display from Rome to Vancouver, has an alternative idea, which he says might shock.

Schmalz is putting the final touches now on Monument of Oppression in his massive studio in St. Jacob’s, Ont., where he’s also created life-sized statues dedicated to women workers, asylum seekers, veterans, homeless people, miners, Samuel de Champlain and Indigenous and African visionaries, not to mention his musical icon, Gordon Lightfoot.
Detail from Timothy Schwarz’s bronze monument to migrants and asylum seekers, installed last year in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. (Handout)

The Monument of Oppression is made up of two hands stretching up from what looks like a prison cell in the ground. “It’s almost like the figures from the past are coming back and reaching out — and the oppressed are having visibility, and it’s a haunting visibility.”

Instead of demonstrators beheading a statue of Macdonald in Montreal in August, or Victoria City council surreptitiously removing another statue of him in 2018, Schmalz asks us to imagine erecting the Monument of Oppression adjacent to a likeness of Canada’s first prime minister, “with the hands going through the bars and reaching toward the statue.”

That, Schmalz suggests, is a more productive way of dealing with the multi-edged legacy of Macdonald, a dynamic Scotsman who both created the vision for the nation of Canada but also supported establishing residential schools dedicated in part to “Christianizing” Indigenous people.

Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer associated with the “founding” of North and South America, also has a disputed history, which has led activists to recently haul down his statues.

Similar removals and debates have arisen over 19th–century B.C. Chief Justice Matthew Begbie, who had to sentence to death five Indigenous men that a jury had found guilty of murder, but who also learned Indigenous dialects, defended Chinese labourers and had strong friendships with many chiefs.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying some Europeans weren’t brutal, say, 100 years ago and further back,” Schmalz said.

“Some early British settlers came to Canada and had this idea they had the real culture and the superior morality. It was actually called the White Man’s Burden. They looked around at the natives and thought, ‘Oh, we’ll make them good British subjects.’ You can acknowledge the settlers’ error and insensitivity.”

But the sculptor says our diverse society should not deal with the inevitable messiness of history by defacing or smashing, in 15 minutes, works of craftsmanship that skilled artists took years to complete.

“You can’t destroy the whole idea of history. Instead of removing it, you have to face it and learn from it. It’s very dangerous to condemn people from 100 and 200 years ago with the morality of today, which is evolving. By doing so you’re saying that our cultural past is absolutely evil. But that’s historically inaccurate and simply untrue.”

Schmalz emphasizes the value of having figurative public statues over more abstract ones, whose meanings are usually vague. He’s created a powerful series called The Homeless Jesus, depicting a shrouded figure sleeping on a bench, one of which is in Vancouver. And he’s currently sculpting a stunning piece, as big as a truck, dedicated to the victims of human trafficking.

Schmalz hopes the piece will serve as a commentary on how slavery, via human trafficking, continues today. Yet somehow, he laments, the modern-day travesty of forced labour, including for sex, is often ignored, unlike slavery of the past.

“I can’t think of one single nation of the world that did not practise slavery, including among Indigenous people. It was a universal thing.” If every historic statue that had some link to past slavery was destroyed, he said, we’d have to eliminate most of the monuments of Rome.

“Should we destroy the Colosseum because it was built by slave labour? We don’t want to just go around the world and destroy. Simply because someone might be sensitive or offended, you can’t edit out our whole history. You have to learn from it.”

Schmalz has worked for three decades as a sculptor, typically 14 hours a day. In addition to standing up for the craftsmanship of artists who creating public monuments, he worries that people who just want to tear them down are revealing their arrogance.

“You are assuming, if you were in that place in that specific time, that you would do something different.”

But, at age 50, he knows most people are simply creatures of their era, conforming to whatever happens to be the unexamined moral beliefs, good, bad and indifferent, of the dominant culture.

That’s why Schmalz reacts when people become devoted to censoring figures of the past. He thinks it’s healthier to focus on the future, and what he calls “finding the truth within specific cultures and philosophies.”

His life-sized piece portraying victims of human trafficking gets us responding to problems in the here and now. And Monument of Oppression forces us to think about how things that many celebrated have caused damage to others.

Destroying symbols from history is easy. But truth-finding, he knows, requires facing up to the moral complexity of the real world.

Source: Douglas Todd: Renowned sculptor touts ‘shock’ rebuttal to, not destruction of, historical statues

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NYPD Study: Implicit Bias Training Changes Minds, Not Necessarily Behavior

2020/09/11 Leave a comment

Significant study, highlighting the apparent lack of change in behaviour following implicit bias training, with some good discussion of the limitations and implications:

As U.S. law enforcement departments are accused of racist policing, one of the most common responses by the people in charge has been to have officers take “implicit bias” training.

The training usually consists of a seminar in the psychological theory that unconscious stereotypes can lead people to make dangerous snap judgments. For instance, unconscious associations of African Americans with crime might make cops quicker to see them as suspects.

After the 2014 Ferguson, Mo., protests, states rushed to require the training. Now a majority do, with New Jersey joining the list late last month.

But despite the boom in implicit bias training, there has been little real-life research into whether it actually changes what police officers do on the job.

“It’s like I’m offering you a pill to fix some disease, and I haven’t tested to see whether it actually works,” says Joshua Correll, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he studies racial bias. “Expecting that we can take people in and train them to reduce their implicit bias — I don’t think it’s been supported by the literature.”

That’s why Correll is excited about a new study at the New York Police Department that allowed researchers to track the effects of mandatory implicit bias training as it was implemented in 2018.

Their findings? As measured in surveys before and after their training, NYPD officers expressed more awareness of the concept of implicit bias and greater willingness to try to manage it.

“We could certainly say that the training can be credited with elevating officers’ comprehension of what implicit bias is,” says Robert E. Worden, director of the John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety in Albany, N.Y., and the lead author of the study.

But then the researchers examined data about NYPD officers’ actions on the job before and after the training. Specifically, they looked at a breakdown of the ethnic disparities among the people who were arrested and had other kinds of interactions with those officers. And in those numbers, they found no meaningful change.

“It’s fair to say that we could not detect effects of the training on officers’ enforcement behaviors,” says Worden.

Worden calls it a “null result”: It doesn’t prove implicit bias training changes cops’ behavior, but it doesn’t disprove it either.

The trainers are undeterred.

“We believe that our training reduces biased behavior on the streets of the jurisdictions where we train,” says Lorie Fridell, the University of South Florida criminology professor who developed the “Fair and Impartial Policing” curriculum used in New York. “That the research didn’t detect those changes in behavioral outcomes does not mean that they did not occur.”

She points to the inherent difficulties in measuring real-life outcomes in policing, especially in a place like New York. Multiple other variables may have clouded the data, such as the city’s preexisting efforts to reduce race as a factor in police stops.

The NYPD brass also doesn’t seem to be bothered by the lack of change in behaviors.

“That wasn’t the objective,” says First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin B. Tucker. “The training was designed just to have them do some self-reflection and just to understand that any biases that they may have may creep into their job,” he says. “That awareness, we think, adds value in and of itself.”

Tucker says the training is worth the $5.5 million it costs per year.

Anecdotally, police officers around the U.S. are getting used to the training and even warming to it.

“I think that even the most cynical cop out there would agree that prejudice on the street is a problem and you’ve got to try to do something,” says Adam Plantinga, a San Francisco police sergeant who writes about policing.

Plantinga says his department’s training was “pretty good,” because it helped officers explore the unconscious associations that might affect their split-second decisions.

“If we approach a suspect who’s reaching for his pocket,” he says, “does that white suspect get a second or two more of a grace period than the suspect of color, before we draw our gun?”

But from a purely utilitarian perspective, do such moments of “self-reflection,” as the NYPD’s Tucker put it, actually lead to fairer policing, especially given the unresolved debate among researchers about how — or even whether — implicit bias governs behavior?

Correll, the psychology professor, says the training itself probably doesn’t hurt, but there’s an opportunity cost to consider, especially if the effort to “fix” implicit bias in officers displaces other kinds of training or gives a city an excuse to ignore factors that are external to policing.

“You don’t need to intervene at the level of the individual [police officer’s] brain,” Correll says. “You need to intervene at the level of the culture,” such as grappling with the reasons certain communities have more encounters with the police, such as poverty or public housing policies that end up concentrating particular ethnic groups in crime-prone areas.

Even one of the pioneers of the theory of implicit bias, Harvard University psychology professor Mahzarin Banaji, worries about the quality of implicit bias training for police.

“The teaching [of implicit bias concepts] has been in the hands of people called ‘diversity trainers,’ and they’re like politicians — they don’t have to have any expertise,” Banaji says, referring to the decentralized, entrepreneurial reality of the world of police consultants and trainers.

She doesn’t like the fact that departments usually make the training mandatory. That’s likely to create resistance, she says, and it defeats the goal of convincing officers that they stand to benefit from understanding their unconscious biases and learning ways to compensate for them.

At the same time, she says, even the best implicit bias training shouldn’t be expected to produce immediate changes in the behaviors of a whole police department.

“That, to me, is like saying, ‘Can I give you a lecture on climate change?’ and tomorrow you’re going to stop driving your car and start taking public transportation,” she says. “I don’t think the question is commensurate with the behavior that they’re measuring.”

She believes there are still years of research ahead before we can say we know how to deal effectively with implicit bias.

Others are trying to make progress on that. Following the NYPD study, the next major attempt to test the effectiveness of implicit bias training on police is work being done by Lois James, at Washington State University. She’s one of the developers of Counter Bias Training Simulation, a curriculum that uses video scenarios in shooting simulators to show officers the dangers created by implicit bias.

The hope is that a more hands-on experience will have a deeper impact, but she’s not assuming it works.

“As someone who’s literally developed an implicit bias program, [I think] it would be irresponsible for us to not test the outcome,” James says. “It can’t be just speculation.”

She’s in the middle of an experiment with the Sacramento Police Department in which some officers will get her simulator-based training, some will get traditional, seminar-style implicit bias training and some will get neither. Then her graduate students will review the body camera videos of officers’ interactions with the public — before and after the training period — and score them for how civilly the officers treat each ethnic group.

James says she finds it “disheartening” that the NYPD study found no behavioral change, and she says, “Many people are expecting me to find nothing too, but we’ll see.”

Even if her study also finds no behavioral change, she says, “it doesn’t mean we should eradicate implicit bias training. It just means we have to work harder.”

Source: NYPD Study: Implicit Bias Training Changes Minds, Not Necessarily Behavior

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Justin Trudeau unveils aid for Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs

2020/09/11 Leave a comment

Answering some of the calls for action by the Parliamentary Black Caucus:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s long-promised action to tackle systemic racism is starting to take shape with a new program that will deliver up to $221 million in public and private funding for Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.

The announcement Wednesday came almost three months after Trudeau vowed to take sweeping action “very soon” to address racism entrenched in Canadian police and other institutions. At the time, in mid-June, the Parliamentary Black Caucus in Ottawa — chaired by Liberal MP Greg Fergus — released a detailed call-to-action that was signed by more than 100 MPs in Trudeau’s caucus, including more than half his government’s cabinet.

That declaration included calls for increased supports to Black businesses, which Trudeau acknowledged Wednesday face “systemic barriers” that have been “exacerbated” by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We need an economic recovery that’s inclusive and equitable for all Canadians,” Trudeau said, speaking at the Hxouse innovation “think-centre” for entrepreneurs on Toronto’s waterfront.

“An investment in Black excellence is an investment in economic empowerment, and economic empowerment is an essential part of justice.”

Billed as the Canadian government’s first “Black entrepreneurship program,” the initiative will involve $93 million from the federal government over four years. This will create an “ecosystem fund” to help Black entrepreneurs access training and capital to support their businesses, as well as a separate “hub” to collect and share data on Black businesses across the country, Trudeau said.

Financial institutions including RBC, BMO, Scotiabank, TD and CIBC will also contribute up to $128 million to a new fund that will lend out sums ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 to Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.

Trudeau said the program is needed because such institutions have a history of failing to support Black businesses, and that his government hopes the private sector will carry on lending more money after this program expires.

“It would be lovely to imagine that, with four years of working with almost all financial institutions on delivering capital, it will become very obvious to those institutions what we and so many of us in this room already know: that investing in Black businesses is an amazing way to create wealth and prosperity for everyone,” Trudeau said.

Chedwick Creightney, 56, is the owner and chief executive officer of VR Planet, a virtual-reality arcade and event organizer in Ajax. As a long-time entrepreneur who is Black, Creightney said he has experienced discrimination when trying to get loans for his businesses, to the point that he has teamed up with non-Black partners to ensure his applications are received more favourably.

“It’s exhausting,” he said, but added that it has been a welcome relief to feel more comfortable talking about his experience in the months since the global anti-racism movement began with the death of George Floyd in the United States, after a police officer was seen kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes.

“We’re not asking for anything exceptional. We’re asking for equality,” said Creightney.

There is evidence that the COVID-19 crisis has hit Black and other minority groups hard. In late July, Toronto’s medical officer of health published data that showed Black people in the city were disproportionately infected with the coronavirus. In its “fiscal snapshot” this summer, the federal government also reported that women and racialized workers are being “most affected due to their significant representation in Canada’s health care, elder care, child care, personal support work, and essential service sectors.”

Earlier this year, the Black Business and Professional Association surveyed its members in Ontario and found that 80 per cent of them indicated they weren’t able to access the federal government’s wage subsidy program — which has since been expanded and made easier to qualify for — compared with 37 per cent in the broader private sector.

Fergus, the Black caucus chair who was on hand for Wednesday’s announcement, told reporters that Black people continued to face discrimination in the 186 years since slavery was abolished in colonial Canada. He cited examples of how Black Canadians were denied land deeds and faced hurdles accessing money that white Canadians never have.

And while Fergus welcomed the new program to support Black businesses, he also stressed how the government needs to go further in its effort to address racism in Canada, calling it “the beginning” of an effort to ensure Canadians are truly treated equally.

“It will not, in one fell swoop, eliminate all systemic discrimination and the consequences, but we’ve taken a positive step forward,” he said.

Source: Justin Trudeau unveils aid for Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs

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