Black MPs, senators call for immediate justice reforms to address systemic racism

2020/06/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

Black parliamentarians issued a call to all levels of government on Tuesday to urgently confront the consequences of systemic racism and improve the lives of Black Canadians.

A group of eight Black MPs and senators released more than 40 recommendations, including the collection of race-based data and the elimination of some mandatory minimum sentences, a reform that has been long-promised by the Liberal government.

Their letter is supported by 27 ministers of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 36-member cabinet, including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Justice Minister David Lametti. Dozens of other parliamentarians, who are not members of the caucus, also signed it.

The calls for reform also include the need to cut barriers to economic advancement of Black Canadians, including ensuring Black-led businesses have equitable access to federal procurement contracts, along with new measures directed at Black-owned businesses disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

In a statement Tuesday, the parliamentary Black caucus said brutal acts of racism that have propelled the issue into the spotlight represent “only a very thin slice of the racism that Black Canadians experience in their daily lives.”

“We urge all governments to act immediately,” they said. “This is not a time for further discussion.”

Liberal MP Greg Fergus, the chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, said in an interview on Tuesday that racism is not just an issue of inconvenience.

“We need to stop this cold,” he said. “It kills. Enough is enough.”

In addition to Mr. Fergus, the caucus includes Families Minister Ahmed Hussen, MPs Emmanuel Dubourg, Hedy Fry, Matthew Green, and senators Wanda Thomas Bernard, Marie-Françoise Mégie and Rosemary Moodie.

The goal of the recommendations is to push the country from a debate about whether there is systemic racism to a discussion about how to end it, according to Dr. Bernard, who is also a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University.

She said she hopes to see an initial response to the recommendations within a few weeks, but acknowledged that implementing some of the changes will take years.

The caucus’s statement pays particular attention to the justice and public safety systems where it says “the hard edge of systemic discrimination is perhaps felt most acutely.”

In addition to the reform of mandatory minimum sentences, the group calls on governments to review restrictions on conditional sentencing, establish community justice centres across the country and invest in restorative-justice programs.

In 2015, Mr. Trudeau promised to review sentencing laws and his government promised the following year to cut the widespread use of mandatory minimum sentences by giving judges back their discretion over punishment. However, those reforms never came and Mr. Trudeau’s 2019 mandate letter for Mr. Lametti did not mention the issue.

In the interim, courts have struck down some mandatory minimums, deeming them to be “cruel and unusual punishment,” resulting in a patchwork of penalties across the country.

The Prime Minister on Tuesday acknowledged the list of recommendations, but would not commit to the justice reforms.

“We are going to continue to look at that and other measures that we can move forward to make sure that our justice system does not continue to be unfair towards racialized Canadians and Indigenous Canadians,” he said.

On the economic reforms, he said the government will be “moving forward on a number of those recommendations.”

Jody Wilson-Raybould, a former Liberal justice minister turned independent MP, asked Mr. Lametti at a parliamentary committee on Monday if his government will “finally commit to the necessary work originally promised in 2015 and repeal, in the justice system, the vast majority of mandatory minimum penalties.”

Mr. Lametti replied, conceding that racial minorities have too often experienced prejudice and systemic discrimination in the justice system and that this needs to change.

Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger said Tuesday that systemic racism plays out in the federal correction system in the overrepresentation of Black Canadians and Indigenous Peoples.

While the overall inmate population decreased by approximately 3 per cent between March, 2011, and March, 2020, Dr. Zinger’s office said that the Black inmate population increased by 4.5 per cent, bringing it to 9.6 per cent of the total inmate population.

In January, his office also issued a pointed report, which said that Indigenous offenders now represent more than 30 per cent of prisoners in federal custody – a new high.

Dr. Zinger said that while federal correctional institutions do not have the luxury of choosing who is admitted to the system through the courts, they do have control over measures such as programming, rehabilitation and how offenders are released to the community.

“What we see is that where they have control, the correctional outcomes are actually poor for both Indigenous and Black offenders,” he said.

Indigenous offenders in the Prairies have a recidivism rate of 70 per cent, he added.

“That is just unacceptable,” he said. “Not enough is done to provide programming that lowers their risk of reoffending and that’s a public safety issue and this is why we’ve made so many recommendations to say you [corrections] need so better with respect to Indigenous people, as well as Black offenders.”

Source: Black MPs, senators call for immediate justice reforms to address systemic racism

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Damning report points finger at Montreal city, police for failure to address systemic racism

2020/06/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

Montreal police operate with a culture of impunity fuelled by indifference in the city administration to complaints of racial profiling, violence and other forms of discrimination, according to a new report on systemic racism in the city.

The police force also works without data and concrete objectives for diversifying its work force, a vacuum that has made it unrepresentative of the community, much like other Montreal city departments, the report by the city’s independent public consultation office says.

Public consultations with a broad mandate to study systemic racism in the administration of the city of Montreal began two years ago. The Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) heard from 7,000 people who recounted stories of profiling, hiring and promotion roadblocks, and both overt and subtle discrimination.

The report landed as systemic racism and police discrimination have been pushed to the top of the public agenda. A series of violent incidents involving police in the United States and Canada have triggered protests and challenged leaders to act.

Long-standing denial that systemic racism is a problem is entrenched in Montreal’s city administration while the police hierarchy flip-flops on the existence of racial profiling and other forms of discrimination, said the report. It issued 38 recommendations including better data collection, enforcement of hiring targets, improved training and more responsive oversight mechanisms for the police and the city.

“How can you effectively and efficiently fight against racism if you don’t acknowledge it exists and don’t have data on what to change?” Dominique Ollivier, head of the OCPM, said in an interview. “There is no culture of evaluation in the city. They give themselves broad goals so any little thing can be called success.”

About 35 per cent of Montrealers identify as racialized or Indigenous people. About 19 per cent of the city’s work force are from those groups, an increase from 12.3 per cent 10 years earlier. For Montreal police, the figure was 7.7 per cent in 2019. Less than 2 per cent of city’s senior managers are racialized people. “They haven’t hired a single manager in three years from visible minorities or Indigenous groups,” Ms. Ollivier said.

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante responded Monday by formally acknowledging at City Hall that systemic racism exists and vowing to appoint a commissioner to fight discrimination. However she offered no new steps to increase work-force or management diversity. “The city must be an exemplary employer,” she said. “We have to hit the accelerator to meet our targets. We can and must do better.”

A spokesman for the Montreal police said Chief Sylvain Caron would not comment on the report Monday. The police force sent out a statement Monday evening acknowledging the existence of systemic racism and vowing to fight it. In July, Chief Caron is set to release a new policy on street identification checks, known in some jurisdictions as carding.

Quebec Premier François Legault announced Monday he is creating a provincial task force to draft an anti-racism action plan by Christmas. Mr. Legault does not recognize systemic racism exists in Quebec but said the task force will address racism in public security, the justice system, the workplace, education and housing.

Mr. Legault said that, in order to expedite action on a long-studied issue, the task force will consist only of cabinet ministers and government MNAs. Mr. Legault put two Black ministers in charge of the task force: Nadine Girault, a former executive in the financial industry, and Lionel Carmant, a physician.

“I am not going to spend my time trying to find a definition of systemic racism that will be acceptable to everyone,” Ms. Girault said. “To recognize the problem is part of the solution, but we must go forward and create a clear obligation for results.”

Montreal’s racism report was the product of provisions in the city’s charter that allow citizens to petition for such consultations. Balarama Holness, one of the organizers who gathered 22,000 signatures to force the study, was pleased with its concrete recommendations but split on the political reaction.

“François Legault doesn’t recognize systemic racism but seems to be taking concrete steps to do something about it. Valérie Plante recognizes systemic racism on a symbolic level and is doing nothing about it,” said Mr. Holness, who is a McGill law student and founder of Montreal in Action, a human-rights advocacy group.

Mr. Holness, like Ms. Ollivier, expressed some optimism that protest and public attention might lead to action. “Let’s hope this is a step to creating a new legacy of equality,” he said, “even if we all know equality is a pursuit, not a destination.”

Source: Damning report points finger at Montreal city, police for failure to address systemic racism

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Canada has a long, documented history of racism and racial discrimination. Don’t look away

2020/06/17 Leave a comment

Good reminder by Mark O’Neill, president and chief executive of the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum.

In the 1980s, as a young program officer in what was then called the Department of the Secretary of State of Canada, I worked in the race-relations unit of the department’s multiculturalism program. Several events, in particular, were formative in my understanding of the state of social cohesion and the institutional response to the diversity of Canadian society at that time. These included the fatal shootings of young Black men in Mississauga (Michael Wade Lawson, in 1988) and Montreal (Anthony Griffin, in 1987) by police officers, and the final report of the Marshall Inquiry, released in 1990, which concluded that Donald Marshall Jr., a Mi’kmaq man in Nova Scotia, had been wrongly prosecuted and convicted of murder in 1971.

A critical milestone during this period was the Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement of 1988, the first time a Canadian government had formally acknowledged and apologized for a historic injustice against a group of Canadians – in this case, the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Collectively, these experiences formed the beginning of what has essentially been my lifelong learning of Canada’s history of systemic and institutional racism and racial discrimination.

The entire concept of Canada as a racist society is antithetical to the mainstream notion of Canadian identity and values (as expressed, most fundamentally, in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms). In an interview with the Canadian Press, journalist and activist Desmond Cole talks about the need to overcome Canada’s self-mythology as a country that doesn’t have the same forms of racism as the United States.

Recently, and in previous decades, Canadian politicians have quipped that a point of distinction between our country and the United States is Canada’s lack of a history of slavery, which has exposed an unawareness of, or unwillingness to acknowledge, the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade that benefited pre-Confederation Canada.

The late Gord Downie was inspired to create his Secret Path multimedia project when, as an adult, he learned of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy who died of hunger and exposure in 1966 after fleeing a residential school in Ontario. Mr. Downie made it his purpose to bring the story to Canadians because, like him, there were so many people in Canada who didn’t know the dark history of the schools.

Academic and author Lubomyr Luciuk, instrumental in the long campaign for redress for Ukrainian-Canadians interned as enemy aliens during the First World War, was initially told by government officials, “That never happened.”

Canada’s racism, both past and present, is a well-documented and undeniable fact. But many Canadians, sadly, do not know their history, so it stands to reason that they don’t know the darker chapters of it. It is profoundly important that we learn our history – and be acutely aware of our individual and collective wrongs – if we are to move ahead as a society, let alone judge others.

The Canadian History Hall, unveiled at the Canadian Museum of History in 2017 and developed by content experts in collaboration with community representatives, aims to bring Canadian history to life in a comprehensive, artifact-rich visitor experience grounded in the historical record of the events and people that comprise our history. In many respects, it lays bare our history. Not surprisingly, not everyone approves.

Examples of Canada’s history of racism abound. Our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, when presented in his complex entirety, is the architect of both Confederation and the Indian Act (the two historical realities are inextricably bound – and critical to understanding both him and our country).

McGill University, one of Canada’s most respected postsecondary institutions, has a history of anti-Semitic admissions policies that were not lifted until after the Second World War. The historically Black town of Africville, N.S., was expropriated in the 1960s; homes were torn down without warning or process, and the community was displaced. The Chinese head tax, first introduced in 1885 and increased several times thereafter, discouraged and penalized Chinese immigration to Canada. It was superseded by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, which forbade Chinese immigration altogether.

The persistence of systemic racism and racial discrimination in Canada is a part of our contemporary history. As recently as 2017, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent released a report on its mission to Canada. The Working Group found that “Canada’s history of enslavement, racial segregation and marginalization of African Canadians has left a legacy of anti-Black racism and had a deleterious impact on people of African descent, which must be addressed in partnership with the affected communities. Across Canada, many people of African descent continue to live in poverty and poor health, have low educational attainment and are overrepresented at all levels of the criminal justice system.”

Both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls have painstakingly documented Canada’s long and devastating legacy of racist policies and practices against Indigenous people.

In April, an article by poet and columnist El Jones in the Halifax Examinerexplored the serious impact COVID-19 will have on Black communities, noting that “racism and structural inequality shape who is affected by this illness and its economic fallout. Systematically ignoring that reality makes Black people even more vulnerable.” The article goes on to describe the disappearance of “Blackness” from the reporting of the pandemic, despite the fact that many Black people are on the front lines and that, like the U.S., Canada is not keeping race-based data on testing or infection rates.

It has been a long time for me, personally, since the shootings of Mr. Lawson and Mr. Griffin, the Marshall Inquiry’s report and the Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement. But along the arc of the moral universe, they are recent events in Canadian history.

The Department of Justice reports that although Indigenous adults represent just 4 per cent of the adult population in Canada, they account for 26 per centof admissions to correctional services.

Political leaders at all levels have acknowledged the existence of anti-Black racism in Canada. In 2016, Abdirahman Abdi died during his arrest in Ottawa, and Dafonte Miller lost an eye after an alleged assault by an off-duty police officer in Toronto. Andrew Loku was killed by Toronto police in 2015 in what was deemed a homicide.

Canadians have much to be proud of in their quest for social justice, including the creation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; the introduction of the Employment Equity Act to guarantee every Canadian equal access to work; the Government of Canada’s apology for the Chinese head tax; and many other stories of leadership on human rights and international aid and development. In 2019, the federal government unveiled its anti-racism strategy, a key pillar of which is the establishment of an Anti-Racism Secretariat that will lead a “whole-of-government” approach in addressing racism and racial discrimination. This is a welcome approach, but there is still much work to be done.

The final panel in the Canadian History Hall at the Canadian Museum of History reminds visitors that “Canadians have inherited a contested past. Like their forebears, they face conflict, struggle and loss alongside success, accomplishment and hope. They steward an acclaimed but imperfect democracy, a beautiful but threatened environment, a revered but relative civility. Their vision and generosity, wisdom and compromise will be their own legacy – for Canada, and the world.”

Source: Canada has a long, documented history of racism and racial discrimination. Don’t look away

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‘It’s a lot of lip service’: Black federal public servants hope ‘Floyd effect’ will finally drive change as anti-racism movement grips Canada

2020/06/16 Leave a comment

Didn’t know that the Public Service Employee Survey allowed this desegregation (not on public site so assume was special request).

Useful:

Black public servants, already more likely to report being victims of racial discrimination than the rest of the federal bureaucracy, are hoping the “Floyd effect” will help drive the changes for which they’ve spent years trying to gain traction.

“In some ways, this has had a positive effect in the amount of interest that it has generated and, you know, white people being woke for a moment in time about the realities of being Black in Canada and the rest of North America,” said Richard Sharpe, founder of the Federal Black Employee Caucus (FBEC).

Mr. Sharpe and FBEC have been inundated in the last couple of weeks with calls to speak to and help departments generate ideas to address anti-Black racism in their various organizations.

The documented killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., by a police officer has affected white people and moved them to action to a scale Mr. Sharpe said he’s never seen in his lifetime. “We really feel a shift and we’re hoping to take advantage of that to make some progress on this work, maybe faster progress now that there’s some doors that have been opened for us,” he said.

Established in late 2017, FBEC’s primary objectives since its inception have been to get disaggregated employment equity data collected so that employees, employers, and policy-makers can all understand the landscape for Black federal bureaucrats, and to provide an element of support and unity for Black employees who are facing harassment and discrimination in the workplace.

It’s an issue Black public servants have long been raising, but now they’re starting to get some data to back it up. Last year, the annual Public Service Employee Survey for the first time allowed respondents to self-identify as a specific visible minority group, instead of all being lumped in to one category.

In a February interview with The Hill Times, Mr. Sharpe said FBEC had a role to play in making that happen. In the lead-up to the 2019 survey, the group met with 25 to 30 deputy ministers across the public service, he said, as well as the Public Service Management Advisory Committee.

Fifteen per cent of Black employees indicated they had been a victim of discrimination on the job in the past 12 months, compared to 11 per cent of non-Black visible minorities, and only eight per cent of the public service, overall.

Of those who said they had experienced discrimination, 75 per cent of Black employees said it was racial, compared to 52 per cent for non-Black visible minorities, and 26 per cent for the public service overall. A little more than half of the Black respondents who said they faced discrimination (54 per cent) said it was due to colour (30 per cent for non-Black visible minorities, 16 per cent overall). Black public servants who said they experienced discrimination were less likely than non-Black visible minorities to indicate it was discrimination based on national or ethnic origin—34 per cent of Black employees compared to 43 per cent for non-Black visible minorities.

For FBEC, the results were not surprising. Mr. Sharpe pointed to the fact that there are more than 13,000 people who Statistics Canada had said identified as Black who were working with or for the public service (including contractors). A little more than 6,200 of the 182,306 PSES respondents in 86 departments self-identified as Black in the survey, which was conducted between July 22 and Sept. 6, 2019.

Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos (Québec, Que.) said the statistics are “proof that more information is not only needed, but is useful.” Speaking to The Hill Times after addressing FBEC’s Feb. 24 annual general meeting, Mr. Duclos said it’s “good news” that employees are now able to self-identify in the survey. “We can therefore work better and more effectively to address the challenges that are revealed by the study.”

Mr. Duclos said the numbers themselves, however, are “absolutely unacceptable,” and that the underlying conditions will be better understood with the data.

“And not only will we understand those conditions better, but we will also have the obvious responsibility to address those challenges, to make sure that things are changing,” he said. “Things have improved over the last years, but there is a lot more work to do and we’re totally committed to do it.”

In his remarks, Mr. Duclos—who hired the Trudeau government’s first Black chief of staff, Marjorie Michel—spoke of the federal government’s “broad policy and legislative framework” to support diversity and inclusion in the public service. Asked if, based on the baseline numbers of discrimination in the public service, there needs to be not a broad policy, but a very specific one for Black employees, Mr. Duclos said that in his current and previous portfolio (he was the families, children, and social development minister in the 42nd  Parliament) he frequently observed that diversity was not only a matter of justice and equity, but also one of efficiency, and led to better decision-making and better implementation those decisions.

“And the fact that Black employees tell us they are unable to be at their full potential is something of great concern to us,” he said. “I will certainly address those concerns and make sure that every federal employee, including Black employees, has the ability to make the fullest impact on our society.”

Black public servants ‘disappointed’ in lack of message from PCO

In the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death and the protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality that have exploded around the world, Mr. Sharpe said there was some disappointment that there hadn’t been any outreach or direct message of support for Black public servants from the top voices—including Privy Council Office Clerk Ian Shugart—despite an ask from FBEC.

FBEC held a general call with about 200 Black employees across the country on June 5. “A large majority of people—because we just let people talk about how they were feeling—felt quite hurt and disappointed that there was no message coming out on the part of the public service in support of them,” Mr. Sharpe said.

Mr. Sharpe said some departments and deputy ministers have taken the initiative and sent out messages, including Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, whose associate deputy minister, Caroline Xavier, became the first Black woman to work at that level of the public service in February.

Mr. Duclos’ office did not respond directly to a question about whether the minister has reached out to Black public servants specifically in the weeks since Mr. Floyd’s death.

Another key member of the deputy minister community, Public Services and Procurement Canada’s Bill Matthews, also communicated his support to Black bureaucrats, Mr. Sharpe said.

Earlier this year, Mr. Matthews was named the Deputy Minister Ally for the UN Decade for People of African Descent within the public service. FBEC approached him for the role, which Mr. Sharpe said is necessary for the work they’re doing to be sustained at the executive level.

“I’ve been in government long enough to know that when the moment is done, and you don’t have presence around senior management tables on a regular basis, then you’re easily forgotten, and there’s another priority or another crisis that comes in and takes your place,” said Mr. Sharpe.

Though Mr. Matthews is “a white dude that doesn’t really have an equity background,” he has been supporting FBEC in a “full-throated way,” said Mr. Sharpe, and as a former comptroller general, he brings a high level of pragmatism to his engagements with the group and its quest for data.

“We’re a government that prides itself on informed decision making, but we have no data on a people that are sort of crying out for supports and addressing issues,” Mr. Sharpe said. “So, he found that to be something that needed to be addressed.”

And despite Mr. Matthews’ full plate as the coronavirus pandemic hit and the scramble to procure millions of pieces of personal protective equipment began, Mr. Sharpe said he has still been “remarkably available” for the short conversations with the group.

The need for better data prompted FBEC to also seek out its own. It launched a survey in May to dig into Black employees’ experiences with discrimination, harassment, and career progression. The 41-question study closes June 30, and is being completed in collaboration with independent researcher Gerard Etienne. Mr. Sharpe said more than 1,000 responses have already been collected, surpassing their expectations.

In a June 11 follow-up response to questions, Mr. Duclos’ office reiterated his commitment to better data collection and analysis. The Treasury Board Secretariat and Mr. Duclos “work with partners such as the Association of Professional Executives to lead shifts in mindsets and behaviours as the public service embraces diversity and inclusion,” his office said.

…

Earlier this year, FBEC was among a community working with the Canadian Human Rights Commission about its high dismissal rate for race-based complaints. “We’ve since been following up with Canadian Human Rights Commission, directly with the chief commissioner and her people, around ways in which we can use disaggregated race-based data and other processes to address the fact that the system’s not working for Black and racialized people,” Mr. Sharpe said.

FBEC has also been working with the Canada School of Public Service, following up after Mr. Sharpe publicly made comments in February noting that the school has a mandate to educate, but produces white managers and staff who perpetuate anti-Black racism.

They are now developing programming that includes the Black experience, the same way that programming already includes lived experience of other equity-seeking groups—as well as having discussions with executive trainers about including education about anti-Black racism.

“That’s the institutional stuff we’re talking about that departments can do and put in place that would help, we think, over the long term that would make us … more visible and put us in a position where we’re actually a legitimate part of the public service,” Mr. Sharpe said.

Source: ‘It’s a lot of lip service’: Black federal public servants hope ‘Floyd effect’ will finally drive change as anti-racism movement grips Canada

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We don’t need China to tell us Australian racism exists – just ask international students

2020/06/16 Leave a comment

From a student’s perspective:

Choosing to study abroad is as much a leap of faith as it is a financial commitment. The decision to uproot one’s life from the comforts of home is always made with the belief that the new place we have chosen to stake a formative portion of our lives will ultimately value our presence.

For many Chinese international students enduring the pandemic on Australian shores, that belief has been shaken. In the latest round of political sparring between China and Australia, the Chinese government has advised its citizens and students to reassess travel plans to Australia, citing a rise in racial discrimination and incidents of abuse towards people of Asian descent. Australia was quick to categorically reject the assertions as “disinformation”and “demonstrably untrue”. But political posturing rarely provides clarity on issues, and more often exposes the insecurities of the players rather than the intended show of strength.

Whether China’s caveat stems from a genuine concern for the wellbeing of its citizens or is part of a broader punitive strategy to condemn Australia’s push for an independent review into Covid-19’s origins will be dissected ad nauseam in the coming weeks. But instead of the preoccupation with how foreign powers choose to define Australian society, perhaps the more deserving and pressing matter for the government is to listen to the voices of those who live under its care.

Indictments don’t have weight without context, and whether or not it’s convenient for those in power to acknowledge, the pandemic has unearthed the reality of strained race relations that permeate Australian society. The Australian Human Rights Commission and Anti-Discrimination NSW have documented a surge in anti-Asian racism, while the Asian Australian Alliance has reported almost 400 racist incidents since April. Behind the dispassionate statistics is a traumatic inventory of lived experiences by the Asian Australian community: a bus driver verbally assaulted, two sisters spat at while crossing the street, a family’s home vandalised with hateful graffiti, an international student punched for wearing a face mask.

These racist sentiments were not spawned by Covid-19 – the virus merely amplified their potency and provided an unabashed avenue for their release. And yet, when China’s travel warnings were issued, Chinese international students quickly came to Australia’s defence, rebuking the notion that studying here was dangerous and expressing dismay that they were being used as bargaining chips in the escalating economic tug-of-war between China and Australia.

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Bellegarde: Let’s just admit it: Canada has a racism problem

2020/06/16 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

As a Cree man, the outrage that has followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis resonates with my experience and my people’s demands for justice. Canadians cannot ignore the dangerous parallels that exist in how Canadian police officers interact with people of different ethnicities and how a distressingly high percentage of First Nations men and women end up either injured or dead at the hands of the people we expect to help and protect us.

Last week, a young mother, Chantel Moore, was killed by a local Edmunston, N.B. policeman who was supposed to be making a wellness check on her. She was reported to be holding a knife and in some emotional distress, but how a knock on the door turned into a confrontation in which the officer felt the need to discharge his weapon five times is hard to imagine. A day later came news that Chief Allan Adam was badly beaten and his wife roughed up during a routine traffic stop by RCMP officers in Fort McMurray in March. The pictures of Chief Adam’s battered face were disturbing, but it is the officers’ voices captured on tape and the speed with which the police escalated the confrontation that should alarm everyone. And Friday night, another First Nations man was shot dead by the Mounties, this time near Miramichi, N.B. The circumstances are always unique, but the resulting escalation and violent confrontation is not.

Until Friday, when Commissioner Brenda Lucki finally admitted her police force has a problem, the RCMP had insisted that its officers respond to situations in the same ways, regardless of whether the civilian on the other side is white, Black or First Nation. But the statistics simply don’t support this claim. Worse, the sentiment among police and First Nations youth is now rife with contempt and distrust.

Let’s spare ourselves another futile debate over whether systemic racism exists in Canada. There have been countless reports over the past 50 years, and the conclusion is always the same: First Nations face systemic racism in every aspect of life and from every institution of Canadian society. This is a fact. It should be clear to everyone by now that Canada’s unwillingness to address systemic racism is killing people. It’s killing Black people and it’s killing First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. We have to move past this unnecessary debate about whether or not systemic racism exists and we have to do it now.

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made considerable efforts toward reconciliation and creating economic opportunities for First Nations, his government remains notably silent on dealing with systemic racism within the justice and corrections systems. Restorative justice delayed is restorative justice denied. It is clear this is not a problem that will heal itself.

Canadians spend so much money on policing despite knowing that it can’t solve the pressing social problems facing marginalized communities. In recent days, there have been mounting calls all over the world to “defund the police.” My question is this: When our young First Nations, in distress, call for help, are the police the right people to answer?

As a country, our focus must be on peace and justice more than law and order. Some would try to argue that the difference between those two philosophies is minimal, but I believe it is the difference between life and death. Instead of putting more guns and armoured cars in the hands of police forces, let’s try funding better schools and after-school sports programs that are proven to successfully reduce drug use and gang violence. Instead of more police officers, let’s focus on ones that are better trained, with higher compensation available to retain those with the best records for de-escalating conflict and not harming those they’re supposed to be helping.

The memory of Martin Luther King has been evoked many times over the past few weeks. One thing he said has always stood out to me: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” It is hard to imagine more challenging times than these, yet it is precisely now that we need Mr. Trudeau and his team to finish the job that they started.

Source: Let’s just admit it: Canada has a racism problem Perry Bellegarde

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Breaking the law: How the state weaponizes an unjust criminal justice system

2020/06/15 Leave a comment

Good column by prominent criminal lawyer Marie Henein on systemic barriers within the justice system:

On June 6, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a knee during the Black Lives Matter demonstration on Parliament Hill. It was the correct show of support required of a political leader, acknowledging undeniable facts: a history, a present and – without change – a future of racism.

But if the Prime Minister is going to stop at a bended knee, then that is as ineffectual as sending out a “thoughts and prayers” tweet. To quote Shakespeare, it is sound and fury signifying nothing. A bended-knee photo-op is not enough. Not even close.

The history of racism, in the United States and Canada, manifests in an endless list of ways. I want to talk about the one I’ve known intimately: the criminal justice system. Its history and present is central to our understanding of how criminal justice, from police powers to sentencing, is part of the web that directly oppresses Black and Indigenous lives. Knowing this reveals the hollowness of Mr. Trudeau’s camera-ready genuflection.

Let’s start here. There is a rational reason that Black Lives Matter marches have been accompanied by demands to defund police, enforce police oversight and decrease the epidemic of mass incarceration. It is because the state’s weaponization of the criminal justice system for the purpose of racial marginalization has a long, well-documented history. Using the criminal law is a dependable and effective method to double down on marginalizing the marginalized and sidelining the racialized. Historically, criminalizing others, locking them up, is a weapon deployed to maintain social dominance. Drug laws, three-strikes rules, minimum sentences – much of it has been born from racism masquerading as law and order. That is just a plain, undeniable fact. It is and always has been the case.

Let me give you just one example of how this political three-card monte is played. One of the most notorious was U.S. president Richard Nixon’s declaration of a War on Drugs. While entrenched by president Ronald Reagan, it was in fact Mr. Nixon who first inspired it when, in 1971, he announced at a press conference that drug abuse was “public enemy number one in the United States.” But the declaration of war wasn’t really on drugs at all. John Ehrlichman, counsel and assistant to Mr. Nixon and a Watergate co-conspirator, later revealed the truth: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people. … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

Mr. Reagan was masterful in his use of the “war on drugs” mantra to whip up mass hysteria and fear with the nightly news showing crack dens and the arrests of Black men. Now the enemy was not only identified, it was real, palpable and there for everyone to see. President Bill Clinton later piled on with his three-strikes rule, proof that cracking down on crime, whether in Canada or the U.S., is something that has always found bipartisan support. You see, the marginalized are not a particularly important voting bloc for most politicians. The criminalization of drugs throughout U.S. history was and continues to be linked to race in the United States. The war on drugs led to the incarceration rate in the U.S. doubling and then tripling. The same patterns are true in Canada’s history of deploying criminal law to control Indigenous and Black communities as far back as colonial times; the incarceration trends of minorities in Canada mimic those of the U.S.

Criminalization and incarceration are the ultimate weapons in marginalization. Arresting someone, restricting their movements through a bail order, and handing out a conviction and hence a criminal record – incarcerating is a surefire way to push down and keep down a population. It guarantees a life of struggle and a burden that the majority of the white population does not suffer.

And it is not just the creation of criminal offences or the expansion of minimum jail sentences that serve this ulterior purpose. Police powers are often also mobilized by the state. Stop-and-frisks, carding and unlawful searches are all police tactics that are disproportionately visited on racial minorities. If you are Black or Indigenous, you are more likely to be forced to interact with the police.

If you practise criminal law, then you know that the majority of times that individuals are stopped by the police that they describe being harassed, the extent to which their privacy is intruded far exceeds the number of cases that ever make it to court. If a police officer improperly stops you, searches your car, degrades and humiliates you and finds nothing, your case and your experience often disappears from public view and into the ether. The vast majority of police interactions do not result in criminal charges. The police officer is often not sanctioned or dissuaded from doing this again. Nobody knows just how many law-abiding citizens are harassed by the state daily. So while the numbers we do have show that Indigenous and Black members of the community are disproportionately stopped and interfered with by the police, their experiences occur in the shadows. Unless there is a death that happens to be caught on video, or a crime alleged, nobody hears about it. But while it is hidden from view, those experiences are lodged in the collective and individual psyche.

The disproportionate impact on Black and Indigenous communities is staggering. Commentators frequently respond that more white men are killed by the police yearly than Black men. That claim is a complete distortion. A myriad of statistics demonstrate that both in Canada and in the U.S., a disproportionate percentage of the Black and Indigenous population is subjected to police violence. It is no answer to say more white people are killed or quote silly statistics about “white-on-white violence” compared to “Black-on-Black violence.” These are distracting, insidious talking points. They don’t tell you the one fact you need to know: If you are a Black or Indigenous man, you are more likely than a white man to be harassed by the police, stopped and searched by the police, arrested, held for bail and incarcerated. That is what matters. If you are Black or Indigenous, you do not drive, walk, live without the fear of state harassment or interference.

The disproportionate incarceration of racialized members of the community tells the story as well. In January, Canada’s Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger confirmed that Indigenous people comprise more than 30 per cent of the federal inmate population; Indigenous women make up 42 per cent. This is a stunning overrepresentation within the prison population. “Over the longer term, and for the better part of three decades now, despite findings of Royal Commissions and National Inquiries, intervention of the courts, promises and commitments of previous and current political leaders, no government of any stripe has managed to reverse the trend of Indigenous overrepresentation in Canadian jails and prisons,” Dr. Zinger said. “The Indigenization of Canada’s prison population is nothing short of a national travesty.” Black Canadians are similarly overrepresented.

The overpolicing and overincarceration of racial communities is a critical point. It is the state that is “othering” a segment of the population. The criminal justice system provides an official government imprimatur that this group of people – “they,” the “accused” – are not like you. The message that is being sent is that they deserve less, are not to be trusted, must be corralled, segregated, stopped and removed from “civil” society. How else are we to be safe?

One of the most troubling aspects is that the police conduct that is inspiring demonstrations across not only this continent but the world is state conduct. Let me say that again because it is a significant point that must be understood: The conduct, the abuse, is visited upon members of our community by our own governments. It is sanctioned and financed by the state. The police officers are state actors and state funded. The criminal justice system is comprised largely of state actors paid for by the government. The jails are manned, funded, controlled by state actors. The offence, the outrage stems in no small part from our government’s role in the abuse of its own citizens. This travesty lays squarely at the feet of our government and the gross inaction of politicians, no matter what their political stripe.

So when the person who is the head of the state takes a knee conveniently in front of the cameras and has not and does not do anything to address the problem, well, what can I say? The person with power and privilege has failed to make the change that is in his hands to make. The state needs to do more than take the knee.

While it has sent well-wishing tweets every which way, the Canadian government has not taken any decisive action on criminal justice reform. The Harper government’s flourish of mandatory minimum sentences, which should have been abolished long ago, continues to thrive under the watch of the Liberals, notwithstanding their 2015 election promise to abolish them. More offences have found their way into the Criminal Code, not fewer. No serious attempt has been made to decriminalize, to improve the condition of jails, to look at restorative justice models – or, indeed, any evidence-based justice reform. Maybe that is because a tweet is easier to read than an expert report.

Even now, as every province and territory struggles to deal with the catastrophe that COVID-19 has visited on the criminal justice system, help from the federal government is non-existent. Today, incarcerated accused people cannot have a trial. Most cannot speak to their lawyers; many don’t even have lawyers. Legal aid – which provides the most marginalized, isolated and disenfranchised with the dignity of having a lawyer help them to have their voice heard in court – are in crisis and grossly underfunded across the country. And courthouses fill up more and more every day with the unrepresented, the underprivileged, and those with addiction and mental-health struggles. In Northern communities, Indigenous people who are accused of crimes and granted bail often choose to stay in jail because they cannot afford the transportation needed to return to their communities. And despite this catastrophic Hobson’s choice, not a single penny has been offered up by the Prime Minister in his doorstep news conferences.

It is not as though smart people haven’t been offering thoughtful policy options for our governments to consider for years. In Ontario alone, two reports were commissioned by the previous government to address carding and the investigation of police. The Independent Street Checks Review and the Independent Police Oversight Review were penned by the Honourable Justice Michael Tulloch, the first Black member of the Ontario Court of Appeal, who made practical, entirely achievable recommendations centred around the belief that, in order to gain any legitimacy, police need to have a vested interested in the communities they serve. His recommendations included investing more in community policing and less on use-of-force tactics and training; investing in community situational hubs where mental-health experts work in tandem with police to address mental-health issues; the creation of a central college of policing that would operate as an independent regulatory body to professionalize and demilitarize policing; changing the way that oversight boards are appointed; and mandating governance training. Very few of these pragmatic suggestions were ever taken up. And so the report sits, among all the others, waiting for someone, anyone, to take a look.

There are real things in policing and in the criminal justice system as a whole that can change immediately and begin to end its disproportionate burden on racialized communities. Wholehearted, reflective, meaningful changes – not incremental tweaks – are needed to tear down the foundations of institutions that have been built and thrived on a racist history, and replace them with approaches that protect all community members.

Criminal justice reform is a good place to start now. It is a good way to show marginalized communities that the state will refuse to use its power to abuse its own citizens. To show that the state will not put its knee on the neck of George Floyd until the breath is taken out of him. To show that the state will not choke Eric Garner for selling cigarettes on the street. To show that it will not shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun. To show that it will not take Indigenous people, such as Rodney Naistus or Neil Stonechild in Saskatchewan, and abandon them at the outskirts of the city with no clothes and leave them to freeze to death. To show that the state, when called to help people in a mental-health crisis, will not shoot Andrew Loku.

So the Prime Minister isn’t just anybody taking a knee. He is the representative of the state, a white man with all the power and privilege that is an unreachable fairytale to most, who has the ability and authority to change things. This is not a time for salutary gestures, carefully measured words and photo-ops, or inconsequential small tweaks. The time for gradual change has long passed. The Prime Minister’s chasm between gleefully putting on blackface and taking a knee can be readily filled with action. So instead of bending the knee, how about standing up? The Prime Minister needs to put his money where his march is.

Source: Breaking the law: How the state weaponizes an unjust criminal justice system: Marie Henein

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‘We’re Not Racist’: French Police Say They’re Being Unfairly Criticized

2020/06/15 Leave a comment

Generally, people and organizations are reluctant to state they are racist or that systemic racism exists, France being no exception:

French police say they are being stigmatized during protests in France against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

On Thursday, police gathered in front of precincts across the country and threw down their handcuffs in a symbolic gesture against what they say is unfair criticism.

“The police in France have nothing to do with the police in the U.S., and we’re not racist,” said Fabien Vanhemelryck, the head of the main police union in France, as he joined dozens of police officers demonstrating Friday morning along the Champs-Élysées.

Just days after Floyd was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis, more than 20,000 Parisians defied a ban on gatherings during the pandemic to demand the truth about the death of a black Frenchman named Adama Traoré while in police custody in 2016.

The protesters said the French police, like their American counterparts, are endemically racist, a charge denied by many top officials in a country that likes to consider itself colorblind.

Mathieu Zagrodzki is a specialist on law enforcement and a lecturer at the University of Versailles. He says police violence in France cannot really be compared to the levels of violence in the U.S.

“French police kill from 10 to 15 people a year,” he says. “American police kill more than 1000.”

But Zagrodzki says both forces disproportionately target minorities.

A 2017 report by the French state civil liberties guardian, the Défenseur des Droits, says people perceived as black or Arab are 20 times more likely to be stopped by police than the general population.

“The difference with the U.S. and France is that in France I don’t fear for my life,” says Thierry Picaut, a black actor who participated in a rally this week.

Earlier this week, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner announced a ban on police use of chokeholds and said there would be zero tolerance for racism in law enforcement.

The police say they need the chokehold to restrain violent individuals and keep dangerous situations from escalating. Officers say Castaner has betrayed them.

Zagrodzki says strong police unions makes reform difficult to achieve – and he say French law-enforcement is in a state of crisis.

“The police paid a high toll in the terrorist attacks,” he says, referring to a series of bloody incidents in 2015. That was followed by the long and frequently violent “yellow vest” protests that all but paralyzed France for much of last year.

The strain on officers has been intense “They have worked more than 25 million hours of overtime in the past few years,” Zagrodzki says, “and the the number of suicides is very high.”

Source: ‘We’re Not Racist’: French Police Say They’re Being Unfairly Criticized

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Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter

2020/06/12 Leave a comment

Tone deaf and blindness about socioeconomic realities:

The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men.

A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter and equated its members with “flat earthers” over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.

Days earlier, the profession’s de facto governing body, the American Economic Association, sent a letter to its members supporting protesters and saying that “we have only begun to understand racism and its impact on our profession and our discipline.” A group of economists, mostly from outside academia, last week hosted an online fund-raising effort for the Sadie Collective, an organization that aims to bring more black women into the field.

Black economists say the events have brought some progress to a field that has long struggled with discrimination in its ranks — and with a refusal by many of its leaders to acknowledge discrimination in the country at large. But the profession remains nowhere close to a full-scale shift on racial issues: On Wednesday, the director of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, told reporters, “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the U.S.”

Black Americans are vastly underrepresented among economics students and professors, a wide range of data have shown. There are no black editors of the most prestigious economics journals. There are no black professors in the main economics department at Chicago, Mr. Uhlig’s employer, which is one of the most storied departments in the country.

In a survey of economists released by the American Economic Association last year, only 14 percent of black economists agreed with the statement that “people of my race/ethnicity are respected within the field.”

As protests against discrimination have grown in recent days, a conversation has erupted — often led by black economists — over how the lack of diversity has left the profession ill equipped for a moment where policymakers are seeking ideas on how to combat racial inequality in policing, employment and other areas.

“Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities,” the Howard University economist William Spriggs wrote to colleagues in an open letterthat was posted this week on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are equal,” he continued. “We find ourselves, as so often happens in these ugly police cases, having to prove that acts of discrimination are exactly that — discrimination.”

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Walmart to change policy that saw ‘multicultural’ beauty products in locked display cases

2020/06/12 Leave a comment

Of note and overdue:

Walmart Inc will stop keeping personal care products designed for people of colour in locked display cases, the retailer said, after the practice drew flak online with many saying it suggested customers for these products cannot be trusted.

“We have made the decision to discontinue placing multicultural hair care and beauty products in locked cases,” the company said in an e-mail statement on Wednesday.

Walmart said the practice was in place in about a dozen of its 4,700 stores in the United States and the cases were in place to deter shoplifters from products such as electronics, automotive, cosmetics and other personal care products.

The criticism of the retailer comes at a time when the United States has been rocked by protests against racial discrimination, following the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, on May 25.

The change in Walmart’s policy was prompted by a June 8 CBS News report that a Walmart customer had complained of the practice being discriminatory against people of colour, while visiting a store in the city of Denver.

“The multicultural hair care is all locked behind the glass. That’s so ridiculous,” Lauren Epps, a Black woman was quoted as saying in the report.

Many companies have issued statements in support of the Black community, in addition to setting up funds to fight systematic racism.

Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon has said the company, along with Walmart Foundation, will commit $100-million to create a new centre on racial equity.

Source: Walmart to change policy that saw ‘multicultural’ beauty products in locked display cases

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