Useful review, showing a reasonable yes. The effectiveness, of course, will require some time to assess:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a knee at a Black Lives Matter rally on Parliament Hill over a year ago, after the murder of George Floyd sparked worldwide protests. Some welcomed the action as a commitment to fight anti-Black racism, while others dismissed it as a hollow gesture.
Shortly after that rally, the MPs and senators who make up the Parliamentary Black Caucus issued a letter listing more than 40 calls to action to confront racism. They called on the Trudeau government to go beyond mere “words and symbolic gestures” to tackle the “crisis” Black Canadians face.
“We urge all governments to act immediately. This is not a time for further discussion,” said the letter.
Several cabinet ministers, Liberal MPs and other parliamentarians endorsed the letter’s recommendations. Trudeau himself welcomed the recommendations — and while he didn’t specifically commit to implementing each one, he did say he would work with the Parliamentary Black Caucus on a path forward.
So, how much progress has the federal government made since then?
CBC News analyzed the 44 calls to action that fall within federal jurisdiction. As of Aug. 1, the government has made progress, budgeted money or proposed a bill to address 24 out of 44 calls to action. But the outcome of a widely anticipated September federal election could unravel many of those plans.
And some critics say the proposed measures still won’t be enough to bring in substantive change.
The calls to action
The directives from the parliamentary group fall under five broad categories:
Collection of disaggregated race-based data
Support for Black-owned businesses
Police and justice reform
Diversifying the public service
Supporting Black artists and culture
How is the federal government doing so far?
Members of the Parliamentary Black Caucus said they could not provide an itemized breakdown showing where Ottawa and other levels of government are on implementing their recommendations one year later.
Liberal MP Greg Fergus (Hull-Aylmer), chair of the caucus, said the group lacks the resources to track government progress on its calls to action.
“We’re all doing this, you know, as best we can. We’re not a professional public service with all the resources that … they have available to them,” said Fergus.
CBC News has reached out to the federal departments most likely to be responsible for implementing the caucus’s recommendations. The CBC News analysis shows that there has been progress on most of the calls to action — either through budget allocations, the announcement of new programs or planned bills.
(CBC News Digital Graphics/ Rob Easton & Tim Kindrachuk)
For example, the government has committed to spending $172 million over five years to collect more detailed data on women, Indigenous people and racialized communities. The government also invested $400 million in its Black Entrepreneurship Program, which is meant to provide loans up to $250,000 to Black business owners and entrepreneurs across the country.
The government proposed legislation — Bill C-22 — to amend the Criminal Code and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous, Black and other marginalized Canadians in the justice system by repealing mandatory minimum sentences for 20 offences.
But the bill is still stuck in the House of Commons and if a federal election is called soon — as many expect — it will die.
It’s not clear how much the budgeted money has actually been spent to date. Also with a potential election looming some of the programs may not see the light of day.
Far enough, fast enough?
Rosemary Moodie is an Independent senator from Toronto and a member of the Black Caucus. She said the Liberals should be careful about boasting of progress made on criminal justice reforms when Bill C-22 still hasn’t been passed through the Senate.
Even if the bill escapes dying with an election call, she said, it still won’t go nearly far enough in addressing disproportionate incarceration rates for Black and Indigenous people.
“When you actually look at the fine, fine print on C- 22,” Moodie said, “a third of 72 mandatory minimums were addressed in that bill, leaving behind a number of mandatory minimum penalties that we felt needed to have been eliminated …”
NDP MP Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre), another Black Caucus member, agrees the government’s criminal reform legislation would accomplish the bare minimum. He also said most of the government’s big-ticket investments in Black entrepreneurship won’t help average Black Canadians.
“It’s not the progress that I think is going to materially improve the living conditions of working-class Black Canadians across the country, many of whom are still subjected to police brutality, to racial profiling in their work, in our health care systems and certainly within policing,” Green said.
Conservative MP Kenny Chiu said his party has been in consultations with Black Canadians and community business leaders and that his leader Erin O’Toole has a plan “to secure the future with higher wages, more jobs, and more economic opportunities.”
“This means jobs and growth in every sector in every part of the country,” he said in a statement.
Fergus told CBC that while he knows there’s more work tMP Ferguso be done, the government has made gains.
“Is it at the timeline that some would desire? No, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that progress is still being made,” said Fergus, who serves as a parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau and several portfolios in addition to chairing the Black Caucus.
Fergus said the government still needs to make progress on supporting Black artists and cultural workers. A spokesperson for Heritage Canada could not point to a program the department has rolled out to support those artists.
“Black organizations and communities are eligible for funding from all programs delivered by the Cultural Affairs Sector. However, there are no Black community-specific program subcomponents in the sector,” said Amy Mills, the department’s chief of media relations and issues management.
Several other departments contacted by CBC said they had launched programs or initiatives to target supports to Black Canadians specifically.
Employment and Social Development Canada announced Wednesday a $96 million investment through the Supporting Black Canadian Communities initiative to back 1,300 projects for Black-led organizations.
“We’ve moved in a big way,” said Social Development Minister Ahmed Hussen, a member of the Black caucus. “There’s more work to be done, of course.”
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.
Very soon is a relative concept to politicians. For the opposition, the shorter the better, even if largely symbolic.
For government, which actually has the responsibility to develop, implement and manage policies and programs, a longer timeframe is involved except under exceptional circumstances such as the various COVID support measures.
The symbolic is easy and can often be meaningful. But tackling long-term structural issues is hard and requires longer-term commitment and effort:
It has been seven weeks since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised action “very soon” to address systemic racism in Canadian policing and other institutions.
For Matthew Green, an NDP MP and member of the cross-party Parliamentary Black Caucus, “very soon” is now long past due — and can’t come soon enough.
That’s especially the case, he says, after more than 100 Liberal MPs and half of Trudeau’s cabinet signed a declaration from the Black caucus in mid-June that called for a wide range of reforms.
“If these ministers are not serious, then they ought not have signed on,” Green told the Star by phone on Wednesday.
“What we’re asking for is not radical. It is actually basic justice principles of applying policy and the legal system in an equitable way,” he said.
Responding to questions from the Star on Wednesday, Trudeau spokesperson Alex Wellstead provided a quote from the prime minister after the Liberal cabinet retreat in early July. Trudeau pledged at the time that his ministers would craft a “work plan” for the summer to build “strong policies” to tackle racism. This would include reforms to police and the justice system, improved protections for temporary foreign workers and legislation to expand First Nations policing of their own communities, Trudeau said.
In 2019, the Liberal government unveiled a $45-million strategy to tackle racism in the public service and federal policies. The party also promised during the election last year to increase funding for the strategy.
But in mid-June of this year, Trudeau pledged further action on systemic racism would come “very soon.” At the time, much of the Western world was roiling from widespread demonstrations denouncing police brutality and racism against Black, Indigenous and other racialized people.
In Canada, demonstrations were fuelled by a series of incidents in which people died during interactions with police. These included Chantel Moore, a 26-year-old First Nations woman shot and killed on June 4 during a wellness check at her apartment in Edmunston, N.B., and 29-year-old Regis Korchinski-Paquet, an Afro-Indigenous woman who died in Toronto after falling from an apartment balcony during a police visit.
On June 16, the Parliamentary Black Caucus released its declaration that called on governments to “act immediately” on a wide range of demands to address systemic racism in Canada. The document called for Ottawa to end mandatory minimum jail sentences, create programs to support businesses owned by Black Canadians and improve the collection and release of race-based data. It also called for more Black and Indigenous judges, and to shift money from police budgets to health and social services.
The document was signed by at least 25 cabinet ministers, including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Justice Minister David Lametti.
Greg Fergus, a Liberal MP from Quebec who is a member of the Black caucus, said Black Canadians have been waiting for decades for reforms and that he is confident the Trudeau government will take significant steps to address racism. He said he has spoken with Trudeau directly about the issue and that he has been assured actions are going to be taken — though he declined to discuss specific plans because he doesn’t want to “scoop” his own government.
“I know that everybody would like this to be done yesterday, but I’m glad they’re taking the time to get it right,” he said.
“For the first time in my life I actually really feel that, Wow, we’re going to get at this, we’re really going to give this a real say — because Canadians will want things to be done.”
Green was less optimistic, and said he believes the Liberal government has already missed opportunities to implement change. He said several demands in the Black caucus declaration could have been pursued immediately, including the elimination of mandatory minimum jail sentencing and amnesty for people convicted for cannabis-related crimes before it was legalized.
The federal government was also criticized this spring for delaying its promisedresponse to the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which probed the systemic causes of disproportionate violence against these groups and concluded in June 2019 with a list of demands for change.
Green said he will be looking to Aug. 12, when the House of Commons is next scheduled to sit, as the next chance for the Liberals to follow up with the action they promised.
“This government can move immediately — immediately — within weeks to award their insiders and their friends a contract that would have resulted in the benefit of $43 million,” Green said, referring to the controversy over the Liberal government’s decision to outsource a student grant program to WE Charity.
“They did that without any drawn out or protracted incremental approach. So why can’t they make those same investments in the Black community?” he said.
Multicultural Meanderings 