ICYMI – A bad trip: Legalizing pot is about race

2017/05/09 Leave a comment

Good piece by Evan Solomon:

Since 1908, when the Canadian government passed the Opium Act prohibiting the “importation, manufacture and sale of opium for other than medicinal purposes,” race has been a key aspect of Canada’s drug laws. It was impossible to separate the government’s thinly developed health concerns about opium from its much more deeply developed racist views on Chinese immigrants. Banning opium then was a part of the larger, shameful goal of preventing Chinese immigration. Fast-forward to 2017 and the Liberal government’s new Cannabis Act, which will legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Amidst the debate about production, distribution and criminalization, one dirty little secret remains: this is still about race.

“One of the great injustices in this country is the disparity and the disproportionality of the enforcement of these laws and the impact it has on minority communities, Aboriginal communities and those in our most vulnerable neighbourhoods,” said Bill Blair, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of justice said back in February of 2016. It was an astonishing admission. In outlining the rationale behind the government’s legalization plans, Blair made race a central issue. For a former police chief to suggest that minority groups have been unfairly hit by Canada’s pot laws was startling to some, and a long overdue admission to others. Has the criminalization of pot really masked a race issue that the legalization act will now fix? If Blair is right, the new act will, among other things, expose a nasty social injustice and deeply troubling issue for police. The trouble is, there is no systemic data available to support his claim.

I asked the minister of justice’s office to send me the statistics that supported Blair’s claim and got nothing in return. “Not going to be a lot of help to you on this one,” said David Taylor, the spokesperson for the minister. He asked around to see if any other department had an answer and found nothing. “What I am being told is that stats on race and ethnicity are not tracked at the police or court level, so we cannot determine whether or not Indigenous or black people have higher conviction rates due to cannabis,” he said. That’s odd, since Blair said the exact opposite. For a government that touts its commitment to evidence-based policy, where did his claim come from?

There is not one source, but a few reports suggest Blair is right. In 2013, Howard Sapers, then Canada’s federal correctional investigator, tabled a report on ethnicity in Canada’s prison system that revealed troubling data. “Over the past 10 years, the Aboriginal incarcerated population increased by 46.4 per cent while visible minority groups (e.g. Black, Asian, Hispanic) increased by almost 75 per cent,” he wrote. “During this same time period, the population of Caucasian inmates actually declined by 3 per cent.” As Sapers discovered, black and Aboriginal people in Canada are disproportionately represented in federal jails: “9.5 per cent of federal inmates today are Black (an increase of 80 per cent since 2003/04), yet Black Canadians account for less than 3 per cent of the total Canadian population. Aboriginal people represent a staggering 23 per cent of federal inmates yet comprise 4.3 per cent of the total Canadian population.” Sapers openly questioned the fairness of our justice system.

While that report opened a window on the race issue, it didn’t focus on drug arrests or specifically on cannabis. I went to the public safety minister to get more data on this, and his office simply sent me back to Justice. I was running in circles. Finally, after three days of asking, Correctional Services Canada sent me some data on the number of drug-related arrests as they correlate to race. In 2014, there were 2,177 inmates in federal prison for drug related reasons (Schedule 2). Close to 270 of those were black. About the same number were Indigenous. While the vast majority was Caucasian, 1,360, it still represents a significant overrepresentation of black and Aboriginal people relative to their share of the general population.

Solomon

These stats are revealing but still not specific about what kind of drug is at play. ”Canada does not collect this kind of data,” Neil Boyd, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Criminology told me. “It’s fair to say that Indigenous Canadians are overrepresented with respect to almost all criminal arrests, convictions and sentences to imprisonment. Legalization of cannabis would, then, have a disproportionate impact on Indigenous Canadians.” But even he can’t say for sure by how much.

There have been other reports that fill some gaps. The results of the recent Traffic Stop Race Data Collection Project in Ottawa, in which a York University research team analyzed 81,902 traffic stops over a two-year period between 2013 and 2015, found that Black and Middle Eastern-looking people were stopped two to three times more frequently than Caucasian drivers. The police association argued this did not prove racial profiling, but it was hard to see it another way.

In 2002, the Toronto Star conducted its own analysis on the difference between how blacks and whites were treated by police regarding basic drug charges and they found a wide ranging disparity. “Black people, charged with simple drug possession, are taken to police stations more often than whites facing the same charge,” the Star found after using data from previously unseen police databases of more than 480,000 incidents. “Once at the station, accused blacks are held overnight, for a bail hearing, at twice the rate of whites.” The Star showed what many in the black community already felt: they were being unfairly targeted. “

Source: A bad trip: Legalizing pot is about race – Macleans.ca

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

In defence of the Office of Religious Freedom: Solomon, de Souza

2016/04/01 Leave a comment

Nuanced opinion by Evan Solomon, supporting the concept of an Office for Religious Freedom:

We not only ought to be saving religious groups from persecution—that should be basic foreign policy—we need to have a deeper understanding of the impact religions have on societies if we have any hope of making a difference in these conflicts. It’s hard to forget the accounts from the famous Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, where U.S. soldiers flying in choppers over Mogadishu hung their feet out open doors. No one told them showing the soles of their feet to the local population was a profound insult, further turning the population against them.

The Office of Religious Freedom was flawed, and never quite lived up to its billing, hobbled by its puny budgets and by the Harper government’s propensity to imbue everything with a partisan mission. But it barely got off the ground, and the core idea is sound. If Canada really is back—this government’s mantra—it had better make sure it takes religion seriously. There is no point in tripling the number of trainers in Iraq if we don’t deeply understand the belief system of the very soldiers we are trying to support, as well as the ones we are fighting.

Conflicts of the future will have twin threats: terror, and the danger of giving in to a xenophobic response. Winning both sides will mean being unafraid to talk about religion, and engaging with religious communities. Without an office to do that, how does this become a government priority?

Source: In defence of the Office of Religious Freedom

And less nuanced support by Father Raymond J. de Souza, the Chair of the former advisory committee:

That reading is rendered more plausible given that the foreign affairs department (now called Global Affairs) undertook no consultations with the ORF’s advisory committee, drawn from religious leaders from across the country. The non-partisan, volunteer group includes many who are in direct contact with persecuted communities around the globe. I am the chairman of the advisory committee, and the new minister’s office never consulted the committee, or its leaders. If there was a commitment to religious freedom, but through a different means, such consultation would have been an obvious starting point.

If the Liberals had a credible plan to advance religious freedom in a world of increasing religious persecution, surely it would have been announced. But since the election, the government refused even to announce its intention to close the ORF, even long after staff was told to look for positions elsewhere. Only last week, when the opposition moved a motion in the House of Commons, did the government declare its decision to close the ORF. Doing that on the day before the budget was released, before a two-week recess of the House, suggests a desire to bury this news. It does not appear that the government even thinks the decision a good one, or has an alternative plan. 

It is also short-sighted. Religious persecution and massacres are on the increase. Should the government decide to launch a particular program, likely more costly than the ORF, to promote, for example, legal rights in criminal justice systems abroad, or political rights in new democracies, or to encourage our authoritarian allies to respect minority rights, then it will be open to the charge that it simply chose not to put a priority on religious freedom.

This week, Dion outlined his foreign policy philosophy as one of “responsible conviction.” The idea is that one stands up for Canada’s convictions, but in a responsible manner, meaning that the objections of those who do not share our convictions have to be generously taken into account, whether it be Saudi Arabia or Russia or Iran. If the closing of the ORF is an example of “responsible conviction” in action, the message will be clearly understood in Riyadh, Moscow and Tehran. Of course, Canada stands foursquare behind religious freedom, but will not raise the matter if it proves awkward. 

Dion himself knows that is the case, as he stressed that “responsible” is not to be understood as an adjective that empties the noun of any meaning. Otherwise he would not have insisted that his new approach should not “be confused with moral relativism or the lack of strong convictions.” The need to emphasize that something is not what it appears to be is the customary way politicians confirm that it is precisely that.

Burying the Office of Religious Freedom

I think most critics of the Government’s decision have overly focussed on the question of the Office and the Ambassador per se rather than the sun-setting of the modest program funds for projects to help support religious freedom, where likely more impact will be felt.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Missing in Ottawa? Government transparency

2015/09/08 Leave a comment

Sounds familiar.

When I was in government, we regularly used Blackberry PINs for sensitive stuff although I was always careful (I think) in my use of language as I always assumed that anything electronic is saved somewhere (and there was a CIBC case, I believe, where PINs were accessed). But hadn’t heard the term off-line used as a verb before:

But the “real problems” go even deeper than that. The revealing PMO emails have hinted at an even more secretive Ottawa, where staffers, diplomats and journalists communicate with each other by direct messages, private emails, or services such as LinkedIn—in other words, on any platform that cannot be exposed under the Access to Information Act, or can be erased before called for as evidence. Call it the Official Underground Ottawa.

“The rule is: Don’t write anything down on official channels that you wouldn’t want to see on the front of the newspaper,” one government source told me. We connected via direct message on Twitter, then used the phone. No email. “And, since the Duffy trial, people in government are even more cautious.”

So what happens in Underground Ottawa? No one uses official, on-the-record channels for the “real” problems. Everyone “off-lines”—it’s a verb. As one MP told me, “I never get on those email chains where cc’ing 10 people is normal. I insist on using the phone.” At the Duffy trial, we learned that key players in the PMO were using instant messaging and text messages to talk about Duffy, but none of it was entered as evidence.

In 2013, information commissioner Suzanne Legault investigated a range of government departments over their use of offline communication. She uncovered the secret door leading to Underground Ottawa, a world with no oversight, no rules and no transparency. Key information “is being irremediably deleted or lost,” she wrote. Legault concluded that retrieving messages was “practically impossible,” and the likelihood of getting instant messages from within a ministerial office was “non-existent.” No records means no accountability.

Source: Missing in Ottawa? Government transparency

Filed under Government Tagged with ,