Canada is a welcoming, fair-minded and racially-diverse country. Why are some Canadians so determined to think otherwise?
The May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota touched off racial outrage across the United States. The tragic event was due to a single malicious police officer who suffocated Floyd while his colleagues stood and watched; all were duly punished for their crimes. Yet the incident quickly became an opportunity for race-obsessed activists, academics and the media to promote a much larger and deeply pessimistic narrative about how American society is and always has been infused with systemic racism against black people. Protests and riots broke out across the U.S., lasting more than 100 days and calling for the police to be abolished and untold billions in reparations to be paid to black people, among numerous radical demands – while themselves doing billions of dollars in property damage and causing dozens of deaths.
Since Canada has so many cultural, political and economic similarities with the U.S., some Canadians seized on Floyd’s death to make similar claims about their own country, asserting that Canada is as racist as its southern neighbour. It is an unconvincing argument for numerous reasons – particularly Canada’s long and proud history of opposing slavery. In 1793, for example, the avowed abolitionist John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (the future Ontario), shut down the slave trade within his jurisdiction. Simcoe’s move was years in advance of Great Britain’s own 1807 ban on the transatlantic slave trade and four decades before the Empire-wide abolition of slavery in 1834.
And no government in Canada ever legalized slavery. Rather, Canada has stood as a beacon of freedom and fairness throughout North America, from offering shelter to black American slaves escaping the American Revolution to serving as the terminus for the Underground Railroad prior to the Civil War. And as British subjects, black Canadians have always enjoyed the same right to vote as other citizens.
Further, the vast majority of black Canadians today are immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. As such, they chose to come to Canada. And most have arrived rather recently. In 1971, or barely two generations ago, there were a mere 34,400 black Canadians, according to Statistics Canada. Today, that figure is over 1.5 million, with more than half born overseas. The surge in black immigration, largely from African and Caribbean countries, must surely rest in part on the perception that Canada is not a racist country. Events in other countries, like the murder of Floyd, say nothing about Canada, Canadian history or the racial attitudes of Canadians.
There is, however, a vocal minority of the Canadian population unwilling to contemplate any good news about their country or its diversity. Most prominent among them is Justin Trudeau. In the wake of Floyd’s murder, Canada’s prime minister sought to inflame and exploit foreign racial tension for his own domestic political gain. In June 2020, a masked Trudeau elbowed his way into an angry crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters on Parliament Hill. He then “took a knee” for over eight minutes while his RCMP security detail formed a protective barrier to ensure protesters didn’t get too close. Later, Trudeau would claim the Mounties, along with every other police force in the country, was riven with the same poisonous systemic racism as those Minneapolis cops; RCMP officials protested in vain.
In a speech to the House of Commons that same week, Trudeau again sought to make Floyd’s murder a Canadian problem. Canada, he argued, is at its core a racist country with institutions that “condone, normalize, perpetrate, and perpetuate” systemic racism. “Anti-Black racism exists in Canada and we must do all that we can to end it for good,” he intoned gravely.
This summer, the result of Trudeau’s vow to end anti-black racism “for good” was finally unveiled. And it promises great harm to black Canadians, their communities – and the country at large.
A Roadmap to Chaos
In his December 2021 ministerial mandate letter to then-Justice Minister David Lametti, Trudeau called for the creation of a “Black Canadians Justice Strategy.” A steering group was duly formed and this past June Canadians got to see the fruits of their labour. The group’s report, A Roadmap for Transformative Change: Canada’s Black Justice Strategy, was authored by University of Toronto sociologist Akwasi Owusu-Bempah and Winnipeg lawyer/writer Zilla Jones. Both are well known for their outspoken black activism, particularly on CBC and in the Toronto Star. Consistent with a policy that was borne of an attempt to import American racial problems to Canada, their 114 recommendations are steeped in the same revolutionary fervour adopted by U.S. activists in the wake of the Floyd murder.
Not only are black Canadians to be institutionally separated from the rest of Canadians, they’re also to receive special treatment even in programs intended for all Canadians. Recommendation #11, for example, calls on Ottawa to prioritize black Canadians in federal employment, skills and business programs.
The overarching focus of the report is to upend existing Canadian institutions along racial lines. Recommendation #1, for example, demands the creation of a federal department dedicated exclusively to promoting the interests of black Canadians. Like the report’s other 113 recommendations, this makes no objective sense. Black Canadians represent just 4.3 percent of Canada’s population. If they are deserving of their own federal minister, why not South Asian Canadians, who represent over 7 percent? Or Chinese at 4.7 percent? Recommendation #2 similarly seeks to establish a “black justice portfolio” within the federal Department of Justice, while Recommendation #3 calls for the same thing at Public Safety Canada. Recommendation #4 would establish a National Institute for People of African Descent to pursue research of a specifically racial nature.
Not only are black Canadians to be institutionally separated from the rest of Canadians, they’re also to receive special treatment even in programs intended for all Canadians. In this vein, recommendation #11 calls on Ottawa to prioritize black Canadians in federal employment, skills and business programs as well as to give black people special consideration in the National Housing Strategy.
Imported racism: Steeped in revolutionary black activism, the recently released federal government report, A Roadmap for Transformative Change: Canada’s Black Justice Strategy, authored by Akwasi Owusu-Bempah (top right) and Zilla Jones (bottom right), contains 114 recommendations that demand Canada’s institutions be entirely restructured along racial lines.This determination to isolate blacks from the rest of Canadian society is bad policy on two fronts. First, race is a poor proxy for disadvantage, as a recent study by the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy demonstrates. In other words, just because you are black doesn’t mean you are poor, missed out on university, work in a low-level job or live in a dilapidated apartment building. A number of racial minorities in Canada, in fact, have higher average incomes than white Canadians. Accordingly, social programs should be based on actual need rather than racial heritage.
Second, programs designed to help a specific racial group inevitably stoke animosity among other groups, leading to greater racial disharmony. Consider the decades-long fight over affirmative action in American higher education, where Asian students in particular were discriminated against in college admissions processes meant to benefit black Americans; this led to a 2023 ruling by the U.S Supreme Court explicitly banning such race-based policies as unconstitutional because they are themselves racist.
Separate Justice is an Injustice
The primary definition of racism is the belief that inherited racial differences “produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” which, in turn, justifies treating people differently based on their race. Going by this definition, Canada’s Black Justice Strategy is itself racist in a number of serious ways.
Its racist intent extends to holding black people to a lower standard of criminal justice than other races. The most eye-catching demand in the entire report is Recommendation #6: “Canada must commit to reducing by 50% the current rate of Black and Indigenous people who are incarcerated, relative to their proportion of the population, and the overall rate of persons incarcerated by 30% relative to the population, by 2034.”
Among the Black Justice Strategy’s demands is that “Canada must commit to reducing by 50% the current rate of Black and Indigenous people who are incarcerated, relative to their proportion of the population.” But given that Chinese and South Asians are greatly underrepresented in the criminal system, should Canada’s prisons then be filled with innocent members of those groups to make their representation “fair”? (Source of photo: NetNewsLedger)Such a race-based amnesty program is driven by the authors’ blinkered view that blacks (as well as Indigenous people) are over-represented in Canadian jails specifically because of systemic discrimination. Yet prima facie evidence of different outcomes cannot be taken as proof of discrimination. Consider that men comprise 86 percent of Canada’s prison population. Should we release nearly half of them because of their gender over-representation?
On the other hand, Asian Canadians make up a mere 5.7 percent of the prison population despite comprising 14.4 percent of the Canadian population. Should we arrest and imprison more Asians to make the prison system fairer across races? That the government should arbitrarily release half of all black inmates would undermine the basic premise – and objective – of fairness built into Canada’s justice system and unjustly punish convicts of all other races, who would presumably be expected to serve out their time as the court system originally intended.
Even in the U.S., there’s scant evidence that the justice system is weighted unfairly against blacks. Research published this year in the academic journal Aggression and Violent Behavior compared 51 separate studies of racial bias throughout American courts. The conclusion: “These results do not support beliefs that the U.S. criminal justice system is systemically biased.” Authors Christopher J. Ferguson and Sven Smith instead found that prison populations are based on actual crimes committed. “Overrepresentation among perpetrators of crime explains incarceration disparities to a greater degree than does racism in the criminal justice system,” they concluded. (Emphasis added)
The ultimate effect of measures meant to divert Indigenous offenders from jail can be seen in the horrifying 2022 James Smith Cree Nation murder spree, when Myles Sanderson killed 10 people on or near the reserve, and wounded another 18.
The “ideal” size of a country’s prison population can be hotly debated from several angles, but it surely should not be based on racial targets dreamt up by activists; instead, it should reflect the number of criminals (of whatever race) who require incarceration. Canada’s incarceration rate, incidentally, has been on a steady decline due to the Trudeau government’s criminal justice policies. The rate (including provincial and federal prisons) has fallen from 138.9 per 100,000 adults in 2015/16 to 101.7 per 100,000 in 2022/23, a decline of 27 percent in only seven years. At the same time, however, crime has risen. During the same period, Canada has suffered a 10-point increase in the crime severity index and a 24-point increase in the violent crime severity index.
Pretendian Social Policy
Beyond demanding what amounts to a general amnesty for black convicts, the Black Justice Strategy seeks to pervert Canada’s justice system along racial lines in other damaging ways. Recommendations #64 to #66 would encourage judges to deliver lighter sentences to black Canadians through the use of Impact of Race and Culture Assessments. These would be modelled after the “Gladue reports” that have infected the justice system’s treatment of Indigenous offenders and which have the effect of arguing for more lenient sentences based solely on race. The underlying, deeply offensive, assumption is that because a person is Indigenous, they are not fully responsible for their own actions. Now, activists are telling the Trudeau government the same favouritism should be extended to blacks.
The evidence to date shows Gladue reports have not benefitted the Indigenous community. The share of native Canadians in prison has actually doubled since the Criminal Code of Canada was amended in 1996 to allow Gladue reports. And the policy of leniency for native offenders has made life substantially more dangerous for law-abiding Indigenous Canadians. According to Statistics Canada data, from 2014 (the first year race-based data became available) to 2023, the annual number of Indigenous homicide victims grew by 60 percent, outpacing the growth rate for the rest of the population of 40 percent. As for those accused of homicide, the Indigenous share was up by 33 percent compared to just 12 percent for the rest of the population.
The ultimate effect of measures meant to divert Indigenous offenders from jail can be seen in the horrifying 2022 James Smith Cree Nation murder spree, when Myles Sanderson killed 10 people on or near the reserve, and wounded another 18. Prior to his murderous rampage, Sanderson had been charged with 125 crimes, many of which were extremely violent. Yet many of his prospective prison sentences were significantly truncated by repeated use of Gladue reports; at the time of the killings Sanderson was supposed to be serving a four-year federal sentence for numerous violent acts, including stabbing someone with a fork. Instead he received a “statutory release” from prison, and then promptly disappeared.
The lesson from the James Smith Cree Nation murders is that the Indigenous community is poorly served by the premature release of Indigenous criminals. These individuals tend to return to their home communities, where they repeatedly re-offend. The situation will be no different for Canada’s black communities. Pushing hardened criminals back into the public to reoffend at their leisure represents a failure of one of the most basic functions of a justice system – to keep the public safe.
Curiously, the Black Justice Strategy’s authors seem fixated on conflating the experience of Indigenous Canadians with those of immigrant black Canadians. “As long as Black people have been in Canada, Indigenous and Black struggles have been intertwined,” the report states. This claim is utterly preposterous. The histories of these two groups could not be more different. For Owusu-Bempah and Jones to cast Canada’s black immigrant community – some of whom were actual agricultural settlers little different from white pioneers – in the same light as native peoples who had been in what became Canada for thousands if not tens of thousands of years seems an embarrassing example of what has come to be known as “Pretendian” social policy.
In a final insult to anyone who thinks justice should be colour-blind, Recommendation #67 calls for the creation of special provincial courts that would only hear cases for black offenders. In this way, the authors want to establish an entirely race-segregated legal system. Dispensing justice based solely on racial identity is entirely unjust and can only stoke racial resentment throughout the country. Black Canadians would inevitably regard their separate courts as an insult, while non-black Canadians would wonder why their neighbours were getting special treatment.
Bail Out
Such special courts may never be necessary, however, as the Black Justice Strategy seeks to ensure that most criminals never see the inside of a prison at all, either pre- or post- trial. Recommendation #45 would require judges to consider the circumstances and background of every accused person applying for bail, effectively encouraging judges to grant bail even more often than they already do, and for reasons beyond the facts of the case. Once a judge granted an accused person bail, recommendation #46 would allow the accused to stay out on bail even if they committed another offence.
This is a particularly odd policy suggestion, since the Justin Trudeau government already made bail much easier to obtain through its 2018 amendments to the Criminal Code. Since then, the country has been aflame with complaints about these changes – widely characterized as a “catch and release” policy due to how it has rendered police impotent at clearing the streets of even the most habitual offenders, and the resulting overall increase in criminal activity. Canada’s premiers recently demanded that the Trudeau government seriously tighten the bail system. And in Ontario, Conservative Premier Doug Ford has vowed to release bail data classified by individual judge and court, to bring public focus and transparency to the issue.
In 2020, newly-elected Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced that his office would no longer prosecute non-violent ‘minor’ crimes such as resisting arrest, shoplifting or drug possession. The result has been a surge in petty crime throughout affected cities and a rapid emptying of downtown business districts.
Given the barrage of criticism, the federal Liberals recently made a slight adjustment to their previous changes by imposing a “reverse onus” that requires repeat violent offenders to persuade the court why they should receive bail for the latest offence they are accused of, rather than bail being all-but automatic. Regardless of this tiny step back in the right direction, the public is in no apparent mood for further bail liberalization.
Then again, bail is unnecessary if no one is ever charged with a crime. Recommendation #44 would see the introduction of American-style prosecutorial leniency, forcing all charges referred by the police to be pre-screened by a Crown Attorney before being laid. This has become a favoured policy of elected District Attorneys in Democrat-friendly American cities – and it has been a disaster.
In 2020, for example, newly-elected Los Angeles DA George Gascón announced that his office would no longer prosecute non-violent “minor” crimes such as resisting arrest, shoplifting or drug possession. The result has been a surge in petty crime throughout affected cities and a rapid emptying of downtown business districts. As one might have predicted, in 2023 the Los Angeles police department reported an 81 percent increase in shoplifting over the prior year. The U.S. experience with prosecutorial leniency is therefore not evidence of the policy’s effectiveness, it is evidence that failed U.S. policies should not be replicated in Canada.
The Black Justice Strategy would also make it nearly impossible to keep convicted criminals out of vulnerable Canadian neighbourhoods. Recommendation #61 urges the federal government to abolish all mandatory minimum penalties in the Criminal Code, making no exceptions even for the most serious of crimes. And Recommendation #62 would make conditional sentences (such as house arrest) available for all offences, without exception. A man could therefore rape a woman, be convicted of the crime and then serve his sentence in the very same community where he committed his heinous act.
Crime? Never Heard of it
Beyond their fixation with race, the Black Justice Strategy authors also make a series of nonsensical suggestions in the areas of housing, employment and drug policy that would harm all Canadians equally. Among these is recommendation #20, calling for a universal basic income of $9,000 per person, a fundamentally flawed concept regardless of race. Yet even these colour-blind economic policy demands will likely hurt black Canadians more than most.
Recommendation #18 would have the federal government hike the minimum wage to $21 per hour. Such a major increase in the price of low-skilled labour would drive low-income and young Canadians of all races into unemployment. Given ample evidence that black Canadians as a whole have less education than the Canadian average, this policy would have the effect of denying more young black Canadians entry-level jobs, preventing them from earning even a modest income while developing important life skills.
Troublingly, U.S. research suggests that as the minimum wage is lifted, so is criminality among youth. Writing in the Journal of Public Economics and using data from 1998 to 2016 regarding minimum wage increases throughout the U.S. and corresponding crime statistics, a trio of American economists report, “We find that a 1 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with a 0.2 to 0.3 percent increase in property crime arrests among 16-to-24-year-olds.” The likely reason, according to the authors, is that as employment opportunities dwindle away, youth have all the time in the world and little to lose by dipping their toes in criminal activity. In this way, Canada’s Black Justice Strategy could become a self-fulfilling prophecy: policies that actually encourage an increase in criminal behaviour combined with other policies that seek to relieve criminals of any responsibility for their actions.
Owusu-Bempah and Jones also want the federal government to decriminalize illegal drugs entirely. The report calls for the removal of all criminal penalties for any form of drug possession up to a 30-day personal supply. In doing so, the authors are doubling-down on an already failed policy that the Canadian public abhors. Last year, the Trudeau government legalized possession of hard drugs such as meth, cocaine and heroin in B.C. at the request of the province’s NDP government.
The predictable result was a rapid increase in the province’s street drug problem, but one that spilled far past the mean streets of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, with drug addicts now shooting up in parks and playgrounds and even hospitals, terrorizing patients and the staff trying to help them. After considerable public outrage, B.C.’s NDP government eventually asked the Trudeau government to reimpose the prohibition on hard drugs in public spaces. Like universal bail, the Black Justice Strategy’s plans for drug liberalization seem equally misplaced and improbable.
Among visible minority respondents, 85 percent agreed that repeat violent offenders should have bail access restricted, 73 percent want more policing and 71 percent want harsher laws on hard drugs. In other words, the vast majority of Canadians of all racial backgrounds reject the entire proposition of the Black Justice Strategy.
Finally, the Black Justice Strategy recommends that the federal government consider giving black Canadians monetary reparations for past experience with “enslavement, segregation, and racially-biased laws”. Even in the U.S., where state-sponsored slavery actually existed, reparations have proved impossible to implement for reasons of both practicality and morality. And wherever the issue has been raised, it has prompted bitter divisions, with debate boiling for years but never being resolved. The concept makes even less sense in Canada, a country which – to repeat one more time for anyone who might have forgotten earlier – has no history of slavery and in which the vast majority of the black population are recent arrivals.
Threatening Racial Harmony
While claiming to help liberate black Canadians, the report’s 114 recommendations will have the opposite effect. By making it nearly impossible to put criminals in jail, the plan would inevitably overwhelm black communities with crime. Black Canadian youth will find it more difficult to grow up in safety and security, and black businesses will face higher costs and reduced safety. Plans to create a separate black legal system, alongside separate black systems for housing, investment, education, research and so on, will make it more difficult for individual black Canadians to find a real job, putting them on permanent government welfare through a host of public support programs. All this will isolate black Canadians from other Canadians and will stoke racial resentments in all directions.
Rather than fomenting such public chaos, the better – and more popular – approach would be to improve Canada’s justice and social welfare systems for the benefit of all Canadians. According to a recent Leger poll, 91 percent of Canadian adults believe repeat violent offenders should have their bail access restricted or revoked, 72 percent want more money spent on policing and 69 percent want tougher laws prohibiting hard drugs. And contrary to the Black Justice Strategy’s preferred narrative, such views are not held merely by whites.
Among visible minority (or “BIPOC”) respondents to the same poll, 85 percent agreed that repeat violent offenders should have bail access restricted, 73 percent want more policing and 71 percent want harsher laws on hard drugs. In other words, the vast majority of Canadians of all racial backgrounds reject the entire proposition of the Black Justice Strategy that seeks to empty prisons, make all drugs legal and set Canadians against one another on the basis of skin colour.
Having sought to capitalize on racial disharmony in the U.S., Trudeau has been handed the exact thing he asked for. Authored by a pair of black activists intent on importing American racial problems north, the Black Justice Strategy seeks to divide Canadians by race, set fire to our justice system, let criminals loose upon their own communities, encourage greater drug use, cause economic harm to young people, erase personal responsibility among minorities and deliberately conflate the very different experiences of Indigenous and black Canadians. The goal, quite simply, is complete chaos.
Prime Minister Trudeau personally instigated the process that brought about this egregiously awful report. The key question that remains: what will Trudeau do with this poisonous document now that he has it?
Noah Jarvis is a politics student at York University and a reporter for True North.
