Canada has been really good at convincing itself and the world that the terrible
things that come out of colonization somehow didn't happen here.
There's no systemic discrimination, there's no system in Quebec.
Thank God that we're different than the United States.
Their denial is part of the system of systemic racism.
It's an inaccurate history.
This country was founded on systemic discrimination.
We don't talk about the origins where it
comes from, how our whole society is based on white male superiority.
Systemic racism is the normalizing of racism. It's not directly in your face.
Systemic racism is something that touches every corner of our country,
every corner of our institutions.
Commissioner Brenda Lucki said she
struggled with the term systemic racism. Later the commissioner said it does exist in the RCMP.
We definitely have that in the RMP and we are not immune to it at all.
These are institutions that were built
with the intention and the understanding that they were not really to service
people who are not white.
There are these myths that we are so radically different from the U.S.
Both countries are founded out of stolen and colonized land, both
countries have attempted genocide on Indigenous peoples, both countries have
long histories of slavery.
It's easy to point somewhere else and it's another form of gaslighting.
In Canada we talk a lot about you know the Underground
Railroad, Black people escaping slavery and coming to Canada. But we don't also
talk about how after the end of the Civil War in the U.S., that many of those
same Black people went back to the U.S. And why did they go back? Because on the
other side of the border, things were just as bad.
The police target and brutalize and kill Black and Indigenous people.
We're literally paying for police officers to brutalize and kill us at disproportionate rates.
One of the officers shot him dead. Moore was shot and killed by a police officer.
I don't understand how someone dies during a wellness check.
The family says the 29-year-old was alone in the unit with officers when she plunged to her death.
Inexplicably killed. Rodney Levi shot by RCMP.
The ones we see in the media now are just the most recent ones.
We've had hundreds and hundreds of cases of brutality and violence,
sexualized violence, killings that have never been addressed.
Let's look at the ways the structure has historically been used.
People who were enslaved would run away
because they were property, not only labour, they were labour and property.
Their masters, their owners would want them back and they would hire people to go
catch them. And police forces emerged out of that.
The whole purpose of the RCMP on
the Prairies specifically, but across Canada generally, was really to suppress
Indigenous dissent. They were also used to take children, put them into
residential schools, not follow up on complaints of the sexual abuse that was going on there.
Black and Indigenous people make up nearly 40% of our federal
prison population, while comprising less than 10% of the general population.
So much of the interpersonal stuff that happens between people, that policing is
now involved in, can be better handled in communities when communities are given
and have the resources to deal with interpersonal conflict.
A CBC News investigation two years ago found nearly half of Canadians who died in encounters
with police since the year 2000 were mentally distressed.
We are here to ask for the defunding of the police.
Over the past decade, police budgets have ballooned. You see an increasing militarization of
the police for a purpose that we don't understand.
So we need to spend money on
mental health workers and a health care response, not on sending the RCMP to
respond to a wellness check.
What defunding is asking us to do is to come
back to the table, examine our structures as they are, and ask: is this appropriate
for policing? It's about how do we get society to function, as a whole, better.
When you're looking at the way that cannabis rolled out in Canada,
it wasn't Black or Indigenous folks that were benefiting from this system, even
though we're disproportionately charged with those kinds of offences.
The system is created to produce advantage for people who are marked as white.
You see all these long line ups of university students, of all of these people who now
can go buy it recreationally, pretty much like they did before. I mean you're
talking about a very low arrest and conviction rate for white
people compared to Black and Indigenous.
When it transforms into the realm of the
legal, it's OK, the representation of it
becomes white and white people.
And then no real substantive justice for all of
those with criminal records for weed possession and some still in prison
today with weed charges and where is the justice in that?
And that is what we mean when we say that institutional racism is a part and parcel of all the
institutions, governing and non-governing of Canadian life.
We've come to a moment in our culture were to call someone racist is seen as more
offensive than the person's racism.
When we call it out, we get told that it
doesn't exist. We get told that we're being radical.
Jagmeet Singh, the first federal party leader of colour, called a Bloc
Québécois MP a racist, and when he wouldn't apologize, was ordered to leave
the chamber. It started with a motion on systemic
racism in the national police force.
Singh says it wasn't just a Bloc member's decision to oppose his motion on
systemic racism that angered him, but a gesture that accompanied it.
I looked back and I saw that MP not only say no, but make eye contact with me and just
kind of brush his hand, dismiss it. And in that moment, I got angry.
What Jagmeet Singh was saying to this person: you are actively engaging in upholding racist
systems. Thereby, by definition, you become racist.
Mr. Singh did the right thing in
analyzing the gesture, naming it for what it is, and naming the Minister for his
behaviour. Then the media focused all attention on Jagmeet,
who was kicked out of the House for refusing to apologize. Where's the focus
on the person who enacted the violence?
The Bloc's leader today said Singh owes
MP Alain Therrien an apology. Me or our team, our MPs, are anything but racist people.
So Mr. Singh became the problem. Not the minister with his dismissive gesture.
If our own leaders can't call it out and name it and hold people to
account in Parliament, what does that say for our ability to hold anybody else to
account and weed it out?
It has to be individual change, it has to be change in
policies, practices, it has to be systems change.
We are being offered lots of symbolism without any substance.
When I see the prime minister take a knee I think of it as a distraction. Here is the
leader of a middle power in the world who could do much to demonstrate what
moving towards anti-Black racism could look like and that's not what we're
being offered. We're being offered a knee.
I've disregarded the knee and blackface
just comes right back to my memory.
It was something that I didn't think was
racist at the time but now I recognize it was something racist to do and I am
deeply sorry.
We need to go beyond performance, which serves who? It doesn't
do anything for the victims of racism. So part of our work is for all of us to
become more self-aware about what it is we're asked to do. You don't have to be
a protester. There's a thousand different ways that people can contribute, but
silence is also violence. It may be writing to your boards of education and
asking them to take responsibility for changing curriculum to give a more
accurate history. If something's racist, we need to call it out.
And that's why Idle No More was so powerful, Wet'suwet'en Strong protests were so
powerful and these protests are so powerful, because it's Black and
Indigenous peoples and Canadians saying you've got to stop this. A Canadian
identity that would be worthwhile is an identity that begins to undo the myths
of Canada.