Categories
Federal Housing Ontario

The Black housing crisis

In these days where consensus on important issues seems in short supply, there is one thing that everyone seems to agree on: Canada has a housing crisis. What there is little consensus on is what, or who, caused it. As Canada heads for an election by fall 2025, media reports declare housing will be one of the central issues. 

According to a Dec. 4, 2023 CBC article, “Housing costs have been on the rise for years in Canada, with the national average home price sitting at roughly $650,000 in October 2023. Canadians are also facing increased pressure from rental costs, as well as mortgage costs as interest rates climb.”

Like many stories that suddenly burst onto the scene as a “crisis”, the roots of the housing crisis date back decades partly to actions taken by both Liberal and Conservative federal governments.

According to the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights May 2022 article Fifty years in the making of Ontario’s housing crisis – a timeline, Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government ended the federal co-operative housing program in 1992, after successive federal governments had built nearly 60,000 affordable homes for low- and moderate-income households. Mulroney froze investments in social housing the following year. In 1995, Jean Chretien’s Liberal government stopped funding the development of affordable housing for the first time in 50 years. From that year until 2002, almost no new non-profit housing units were created.  In 1999, the Chretien government shifted the responsibility of administering and funding social housing to provincial governments. In Ontario, this was done through the signing of the Canada-Ontario Social Housing Agreement. A year earlier in 1998, Ontario Premier Mike Harris’ Conservatives passed Ontario’s Tenant Protection Act, which provided more protection to landlords than tenants by eliminating rent controls on vacant units. Because of these cutbacks, 17,000 non-profit and co-operative housing units that had been slated for construction were cancelled.

That was the beginning of things getting bad for many Canadians regarding housing. But, as with most national crises, evidence indicates the housing crisis is having a disproportionately negative effect on Black Canadians.  

According to Statistics Canada’s Housing experiences in Canada: Black people in 2018, in 2018, 52% of Black people in Canada lived in rented dwellings compared to 27% for the total population. Among Black people who rented their dwellings, 57% reported being satisfied (or very satisfied) with their dwelling compared to 69% in the total population. Of Black people who lived in rented dwellings 30% were more likely to live in unsuitable housing compared 19% of the total population who lived in rented dwellings.

According to the Canadian Housing Survey, in 2021, Black and Indigenous Canadians were 2 times more likely to be evicted compared to white Canadians. This same study found that 12% of Black and 13% of Indigenous respondents had experienced an eviction in their lifetime compared to 7% of respondents who identified as neither Black nor Indigenous. 

There are many more stats just as there are many organizations taking action to address the crisis.

The federal government’s 2019 National Housing Strategy Act declared that “the right to adequate housing is a fundamental human right affirmed in international law.” Adequate housing is understood in international law as housing that provides secure tenure; is affordable; is habitable; provides access to basic infrastructure; is located close to employment, services and amenities; is accessible for people of all abilities; and is culturally appropriate.”

In December, 2020, the federal government, in partnership with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Habitat for Humanity Canada, announced an investment of $40 million to create 200 home ownership “opportunities” across the country for Black Canadians (it’s very unclear what that means as it doesn’t say it means 200 new homes.)

February 1, 2022 the federal government announced up to $50 million dedicated to building housing for Black households. The funding through the National Housing Co-Investment Fund (NHCF) will support Black-led organizations to build housing, as well as more affordable housing for Black renter households in Canada. On June 24, 2022, the federal government launched applications for funding for Black-led organizations dedicated to building housing for Black households through the $50 million program.

February 18, 2022, the federal government announced $10 million in federal funding for the BlackNorth Homeownership Bridge Program. The announcement said the investment will help deliver an estimated 200 affordable homes to first-time homeowner Black families in the Greater Toronto Area within the next four years. The program is led by BlackNorth Initiative (BNI) in partnership with Habitat for Humanity Greater Toronto Area and the Dream Legacy Foundation.

According to the BNI website, the program works by enabling families to get mortgages – with no down payment required – for as much of the home purchase price as they qualify for. BNI then gives them a mortgage for the remaining amount and shares the equity in the house with the family.

In December 2023, Ontario passed the Affordable Homes and Good Jobs Act, which it claims will make it cheaper and easier to build affordable homes, provide certainty to municipalities and help more Ontarians find an affordable home based on their household income. The Act is supposed to support measures made through the government’s housing supply actions plans and its commitment to help communities across Ontario build at least 1.5 million homes by 2031. The Ontario government says the proposed changes would update the definition of affordable housing units that would qualify for development-related charge discounts and exemptions and help lower the cost of building, purchasing and renting affordable homes across the province.

Locally, the City of Ottawa increased its affordable housing budget from $15 million to $23.8 million in its 2024 budget but media reports said the budget increase won’t necessarily result in more units hitting the market as the federal and provincial governments need to sign on first.

The Alliance to End Homelessness continues its work in Ottawa including producing a report on scaling up affordable housing in Ottawa, convening an expert steering team including people with lived experience of homelessness and leading the DASH Project in collaboration with researchers at the University of Ottawa to create a dashboard that will integrate existing databases of people waiting for social housing, people in the shelter system, and the available housing stock in a given community.

Starts With Home is leading an initiative in my home town of Ottawa. The initiative focuses on three key messages: stop the loss, create more and preserve the quality.

Stop the loss means stopping things like renovictions where landlords evict tenants to renovate their properties and turn them into high priced unaffordable units. Start With Home recommends stopping the loss by 1) creating municipal policies strengthening tenant protections against renovictions and demovictions and 2) creating a non-profit housing acquisition strategy, supported by City purchases of private market residential properties, for the purpose of turning them over to non-profit housing providers.

Starts With Home recommends creating more affordable housing by 1) developing a strong Inclusionary Zoning policy ensuring new builds have permanent affordable units, based on a household’s income and 2) increasing the municipal budget to house 1,000 households each year, committing 30% as part of a For Indigenous, By Indigenous Housing Strategy.

Finally, to preserve the quality Starts With Home recommends 1) requiring landlords in Ottawa to be licensed for more effective oversight of property maintenance and providing funding, where needed, for small landlords to do maintenance repairs rather than sell their rental units and 2) assigning an independent Housing Ombudsperson to implement the right to housing in line with the federal commitment to housing as a human right.

Starts With Home’s recommendation to create a non-profit housing acquisition strategy has support from at least one organization that’s part of the group some blame as being one of the main contributors to the housing crisis: real estate investment trusts. REITs are companies that own, and in most cases operate, income-producing real estate. REITs can own many types of commercial real estate, including office and apartment buildings, warehouses, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels and commercial forests. REITs have been criticised as enabling speculation on housing, and reducing housing affordability, without increasing finance for building. However, in a July 2023 article, Canadian Apartment Properties REIT (CAPREIT) President and CEO Mark Kenney supported the idea of an “affordable acquisition fund” very similar to Start With Home’s non-profit housing acquisition strategy. CAPREIT’s website says its Canada’s largest publicly traded provider of quality rental housing that, as of September 30, 2023, owned approximately 64,500 residential apartment suites, townhomes and manufactured home community sites well-located across Canada and the Netherlands. 

ACORN Canada, an independent national organization of low and moderate income people with 160,000+ members in 20+ neighbourhood chapters across 9 cities is linking housing justice and climate justice with its eco-tenant union initiative. ACORN’s website says, “…no one is reaching out and connecting [low income tenants’] primary concerns of high rent, expensive bills, and disrepair in their units, to the issue of climate change. This is where ACORN’s eco-tenant unions come in. These are tenant unions that work to advance improvements in their buildings, neighbourhoods and city that are win-win for tenants AND the environment.”

I also came across a poster for the Rental Registry with ACORN’s Tenant Union logo at top. The Rental Registry is a public website where people can list their rents that allows tenants to know the rent paid for a rental unit, currently or in the past. “It gives the power of open data to tenants, by creating transparency in the rental market.”

The Black-owned consulting firm CP Planning works on affordable housing in Toronto, Peel, York, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa. It describes itself as “a non-profit urban planning organization practicing a human rights-based approach to community planning. Our mission is to align public, non-profit, and private sector organizations within the land use development industry to invest in solutions that uphold the economic, social, and cultural rights of marginalized people to have access to good housing, good jobs, an adequate standard of living, and opportunities for cultural expression. We envision a world with more joy, where people are affirmed through a sense of community and belonging.”

I have attended several excellent in-person and online CP Planning events focused on a broad range of affordable housing issues. They have a workshop series that includes several covering how people can organize to develop their own affordable housing projects. CP meets people in their neighborhoods instead of always requiring people to come to them.

With all these initiatives underway the main question will be: are they getting houses built? This question is particularly important given the complexity of the housing issue makes it especially vulnerable to diversity and inclusion illusion initiatives that support collective resistance I talked about in my post It’s time to end the “War On Hate”

If program websites don’t have big “NUMBER OF HOUSES BUILT SO FAR” buttons right at the top of their website and testimonials from people who have actually gotten houses via the program we must ask: why not?

Categories
Anti-Black racism Israel

Israeli governments have a long history of anti-Blackness

This is a follow up to my October 2022 post Black and Jewish activists share a long history of collaboration and is about the actions of Israeli governments, not Israelis or Jewish people in general.

Since Israel’s creation in 1948, much of what successive Israeli governments have done has been pro-Israel – and anti-Black. Being pro-Israel is largely what they got elected to do, being anti-Black isn’t.

This started with Israel’s complex relationship with South Africa’s apartheid regime – which South Africa also started in 1948. 

[Note: Much of what follows is taken from the Wikipedia post Israel-South African relations which I have indicated with quotes. I enclose things I’ve added with square brackets.]

“The Union of South Africa was among the thirty-three states that voted in favour of the 1947 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan, which endorsed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. On 24 May 1948, nine days after Israel’s declaration of independence, the South African government of Field Marshal Jan Smuts became the seventh foreign government to grant de facto recognition to the State of Israel. Two days later, Smuts was voted out and the new South African government was formed by D.F. Malan’s National Party (NP), which had run on a platform of legislating apartheid. This result was of interest to Israel primarily because of the presence in South Africa of a large Jewish population: by 1949, there were 120,000 Jews living in South Africa, the overwhelming majority of whom were Zionists….[According to Oxford Languages a Zionist is “a person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.”]…many of whom had provided important financial support to the Zionist movement…After its election to government, the NP apparently overcame its earlier tendency towards “virulent anti-Semitism”. The South African government granted de jure recognition to Israel on 14 May 1949. Formal diplomatic relations between the countries began in the same year, with the opening of Israel’s consulate-general in Pretoria…In addition to granting Israel diplomatic recognition, Malan…relaxed South Africa’s rigid currency regulations to permit the export of commodities and foreign exchange to Israel…Annual flows of funds to Israel from South Africa were estimated at $700,000 by [1959], and in all it was estimated that South African Jews sent more than $19.6 million to Israel between 1951 and 1961.”

This friendly start to Israeli-South African relations quickly changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel began taking positions opposing South African apartheid at the United Nations. During this time, UN General Assembly debates over apartheid had become increasingly vociferous. “This had begun in the very week of Israel’s accession to the UN in May 1949, when it had supported a motion requiring South Africa to enter into roundtable discussions with Pakistan and India over apartheid and its implications for Indian and Pakistani citizens. In December 1950, [Israeli] diplomat Michael Comay wrote in an internal memo that the Israeli strategy in such votes was to:

“generally refrain from condemnation of South Africa, and from passing any judgment on the specific merits of the issues… On the other hand, we can and should refrain from any express or implied support for the South African caste system…”

In a letter in December, Comay summarised this position as responding to the need to “find a compromise between our principles and convictions on matters of racialism, and our desire to maintain friendship with South Africa”. According to legal historian Rotem Giladi, during the 1950s this manifested in frequent “equivocation” on apartheid by the Israeli mission to the UN – though Giladi also argues that Israel’s speeches and votes on apartheid were nonetheless “considerably more progressive” than those of many Western states. And, during the 1960s, Israel became increasingly consistent in its criticism of the South African government; it frequently voted against South Africa and apartheid at the UN.

In October 1962 at the UN General Assembly, Israel voted in favour of the landmark Resolution 1761, which strongly condemned apartheid and called for voluntary sanctions against South Africa. Members of the Israeli legislature, the Knesset, approved the measure in a 63–11 vote. [In 1962, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was serving for his second time as prime minister and head of the Mapai party, a democratic socialist political party that was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the modern-day Israeli Labor Party in 1968.] The following year, Israel announced that it had withdrawn its envoy to South Africa…It also announced that it was taking steps to enforce an embargo against the South African military, as called for by Resolution 1761…In the 1960s, senior Israeli politicians frequently framed diplomatic opposition to apartheid as a matter of principle: in October 1963, Golda Meir, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, told the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “deep abhorrence for all forms of discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or religion… stems from our age-old spiritual values, and from our long and tragic historical experience as a victim”. Israel also had strategic reasons to distance itself from South Africa: as a counterbalance to the hostility of the Arab and Soviet blocs, it increasingly sought closer ties with black African states, which were gaining their political independence during that time and which strongly opposed the apartheid policy and South Africa’s regional hegemony. These moral and strategic considerations had to be balanced against the concerns of South African Jews…”

Then something happened that would draw Israel and South Africa back together…

“In 1967, Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and subsequent occupation of the Sinai and the West Bank alienated it diplomatically from much of the Third World and black Africa, whose nationalist movements began to view Israel as a colonial state. At the same time, Israel became the object of admiration among parts of the South African white population, particularly among the country’s political and military leadership. An editorial in Die Burger, then the mouthpiece of the South African National Party, declared:

“Israel and South Africa… are engaged in a struggle for existence… The anti-Western powers have driven Israel and South Africa into a community of interests which had better be utilized than denied.”

The 1973 Yom Kippur War, however, came with “the near-complete collapse of Israel’s position in Africa.” [The war was fought from October 6 to 25, 1973, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria]. By the end of 1973, all but four African states had severed diplomatic relations with Israel. This was partly due to the 1973 oil embargo instituted by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries against Israel’s Western partners, which reinforced a new alliance between the Arab and black African states. 

At the UN General Assembly in the 1970s, Israel abstained from some key votes affecting South Africa, such as the vote on granting observer status to the African National Congress (ANC) in 1972, and votes against apartheid in later years.

In the 1970s Israel aided the National Liberation Front of Angola …forces organized and trained by South Africa and the [US Central Intelligence Agency] to forestall the formation of a government led by the  MPLA [People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola] during the Angolan Civil War…”

“By 1987, Israel found itself the only developed nation in the world that still maintained strong relations with South Africa.”

Israeli governments’ checkered past regarding treatment of Black people in South Africa mirrors their treatment of Black Israelis.

Following high profile stories of Israel airlifting thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991 far less was heard about how life was for Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, in Israel.

In a January 2023 article Fighting on Behalf of Ethiopian Jews in Brandeis University’s The Jewish Experience, Penny Schwartz features the story of Ethiopian Jew Shula Mola. Schwartz writes that, “Mola arrived in Israel in 1984 at age 12, but life in the country hasn’t been what she imagined. Ethiopian Jews, in her experience, face mistreatment, discrimination, and injustice. Today, she is one of the community’s leading activists, a board member of the New Israel Fund, a group advocating for equality for Israel’s minorities, and a co-founder of Mothers on Guard, which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described as the “Black Jewish wall of moms fighting Israeli police brutality.” She was recently named one of Israel’s 50 most influential women by the country’s leading economic newspaper, Globes. Ethiopian Jews started coming to Israel in the late 1970s. As a result of efforts by Ethiopian Jews, the U.S., Israel, several other countries, and activists around the world, many more managed to leave over the next two decades. Today, there are some 160,000 Israelis of Ethiopian origin.”

The article describes Ethiopian Jews experiencing things similar to African Americans and African Canadians. Mola attended boarding school where some classmates taunted her for her dark skin color and challenged her Jewish identity. Her younger brother, a special education high school student, was in a class too large to accommodate his specific needs, and she felt there was a lack of precise diagnosis for his particular learning challenges. She was even more disturbed when she realized that more than half the class was from the Beta Israel community and faced similar circumstances.

Beta Israel income levels remain around 40% lower [than the general population], according to a 2018 report by the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, an Israeli research center. 

And Beta Israelis face police brutality as Schwartz writes:


“Mola helped start Mothers on Guard in 2016 in response to a decision by Israeli authorities to close an investigation into the death of Yosef Salamsa, a 22-year-old of Ethiopian descent. Salamsa was tasered by police in Jerusalem two years earlier and found dead several months later. Police were never charged in the incident. Four years ago, when an off-duty Israeli cop in Haifa shot dead an Ethiopian-Israeli teenager, Mola protested for months, demanding reforms in the criminal justice system. In a newspaper editorial, [Mola] recounted a conversation with her son while she was out demonstrating.

“The police killed an Ethiopian boy. Why didn’t you tell me that they are killing us?” he asked her over the phone. 

“Sweetheart! My dear child,” she told him. “There are stupid policemen — hotheads who kill people. They’ll pay for what they did.”

According to [Israeil newspaper] Haaretz, cases opened [by police] against Ethiopian minors were 4.3 times their share of the population between 2018 and 2020.

Mola said she’s had to have “the talk” with her son where she instructed him on what to do if the police stop him: “Don’t be smart or cool. Don’t get angry. After that, call your ima,” she told him, using the Hebrew word for mother. “It was the most painful moment,” Mola said in an interview. “It was the hardest thing for me … to realize that I’m raising kids with limits on their freedom.””

In addition to Israeli police limiting the freedom of Black Jewish kids, the Israeli government denied some Ethiopian Jewish women another basic freedom: the freedom to have children. A January 2013 Independent story, Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent, reported that, “Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.” The story detailed how Israeli gynaecologists, on orders from the Israeli Health Ministry, had been giving Ethiopian Jewish women injections of “Depo-Provera, which is injected every three months and is considered to be a highly effective, long-lasting contraceptive.”

From support for South African apartheid to arming the wrong side of African colonial struggles to enforcing systemic anti-Black racism against their own Beta Israeli citizens, successive Israeli governments have supported the very policies Black and Jewish activists have a long and rich history of opposing together.

Categories
Hate crime War on Hate

It’s time to end the “War on Hate”

Over the last few years, the city and country I live in, Ottawa and Canada, have been committing increasing resources to combat “hate”. In November 2019, the United Way of Eastern Ontario launched Ottawa’s United for All coalition. U4A was billed as “a coalition of 44 organizations representing 150+ partners who are all committed to overcoming hate-based violence, racism, and extremism in East Ontario.” The coalition’s website says it includes “social service agencies, faith-based organizations, policymakers, human rights groups, health providers, school boards and post-secondary institutions, grassroots social justice groups, criminal justice professionals, cultural groups and more.” The coalition also includes the Ottawa Police Service (maybe they’re the “criminal justice professionals”?) but no Black-led groups or police abolitionist groups, and only one Indigenous group.

The Government of Canada’s Budget 2022 announced the launch of a National Action Plan on Combatting Hate to be combined with a new anti-racism strategy to replace the existing one. 

Also in March 2022, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) and the Chiefs of Police National Roundtable announced the formation of a joint Task Force on Hate Crime at a national hate crimes conference. The announcement said the task force would be co-chaired by the CRRF and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The problem is that initiatives to combat hate in Ottawa, which is the home of the federal government, have had the impact of funneling money to the Ottawa police and initiatives at all levels have done little to address hate, let alone systemic, state-led anti-Black hate. This, despite the fact that Statistics Canada reported that Black Canadians faced the most hate crimes in Canada in 2020.

Instead, what we’ve seen is that the War on Hate, much like the War on Drugs, at all levels, is:

1) disproportionately harming Black Canadians by diverting focus and resources from addressing systemic, state-led, anti-Black hate;

2) fueling police budget increases; and

3) doing little to address the rise in white supremacist hate.

This isn’t because the War on Hate has failed. On the contrary, like the War on Drugs, it’s going exactly as planned.

One of the clearest indicators that Ottawa’s War on Hate isn’t designed to actually stop hate is the fact that the Ottawa police didn’t charge a single Ottawa Freedom Convoy protestor with a hate crime despite some of them carrying signs with Swastikas, being members of known white supremacy groups and allegedly verbally harassing women and racialized Ottawa residents for three weeks.

That the United for All coalition was never intended to address state-sponsored hate is clear from the fact the Ottawa Police Service are members and the coalition has been silent on issues like the OPS’ own data showing they continue to use force disproportionately on Black, Indigenous and Middle Eastern Ottawa residents – and have presented no plan to stop doing so.

Another question raised by the War on Hate is – hate against who? The Government of Canada has shown itself to be very selective in the hate it targets as indicated by a November 2023 open letter to the federal government from El Jones, a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In her letter, Jones cites February 2023 Government of Canada press releases announcing a change to the way the government would vet funding requests for community and anti-racism projects. According to these reports, government ministers would have the power to terminate funding to groups who “espouse hate and discrimination”, including vetting of social media accounts of staff of organizations who have received funding. 

Jones asked whether the government would be suspending funds to CIJA (Centre for Israel and Jewish affairs) and reviewing the record of its funding. She argued that “even the most cursory read of CIJA’s social media reveals deeply disturbing anti-Palestinian racism, incitement to violence, and harassment of advocates speaking for Palestinian lives. The recent anti-Semitism conference hosted by CIJA and attended by numerous government leaders and officials featured a speaker who posted deeply dehumanizing content online, including a depiction of Palestinians as cockroaches. This post was labelled by Twitter as “sensitive content” due to its hateful nature – as the community note pointed out, the depiction of ethnic groups as cockroaches has a long history in inciting genocide, notably in Rwanda.”

Jones had not received a reply as I write this…

The fact the Ottawa police are members of the United for All coalition is one indication of the close ties between anti “hate” groups and police. Another indicator was former U4A leader Abid Jan leaving the United Way in March 2023 to become Director, Community Safety and Well Being…with the Ottawa Police Service.

This movement of people between the police and other organizations is one aspect of what we call “collective resistance”. Another example was former Ottawa police Chief Financial Officer, Cyril Rogers, becoming Ottawa’s General Manager and Chief Financial Officer in January 2023. 

I first came up with the concept of collective resistance after seeing a woman from the Tamarack Institute talk about what she called collective impact at a November 2022 conference. She said collective impact was a key operating principle for Tamarack and defined it as “a network of community, members, organizations and institutions that…advance equity by learning together, aligning and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change.” However, when I saw her definition an alternate definition – of collective resistance – immediately popped into my head:

“Collective resistance is a network of community, members, organizations and institutions that…impede movement toward real equity by working together, aligning and integrating their actions resulting in resistance to population and systems-level change.”

The November 2022 conference was the United Way’s Leveraging Our Strengths conference – focused on implementing equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives. 

In his new role as Ottawa’s General Manager and Chief Financial Officer, Cyril Rogers gave a presentation on the City budget at a consultation hosted by three city councillors in February 2023 and said money from the police budget couldn’t be moved anywhere else. When I challenged this by reminding him that, in 2021, the Ottawa Police Services Board and City Council approved $3 million dollars less than the police asked for – and used the money for youth mental health services – Rogers then admitted that money could in fact be moved from the police to other things. If he had done that just once, I might have thought he temporarily had his facts wrong – but then he made exactly the same claim at an October 2023 budget consultation. This kind of misleading information helps justify police budgets that help fund the War on Hate.

A key tool of collective resistance is creating initiatives that claim to be working for fundamental change but have little to no criteria, or misleading criteria, to measure what they’re actually achieving, if anything. The Ottawa Police Service’s hate crime unit is an example. 

In January 2023, the Ottawa Police Service issued a press release titled “Annual Hate Crimes data show a 13% increase in reporting to police”. The first line of the release was, “The Ottawa Police Service Hate and Bias Crime Unit released its 2022 Annual statistics. The Hate and Bias Crime unit saw 377 total incidents, including 300 criminal and 77 hate incidents, which marks an increase of 13% over 2021.” Later, the release said:

 “The groups most victimized are:

    Jewish

    Muslim

    Black

    LGBTQ+

    Arab West Asian

    East and South Asian”

The release didn’t say how many incidents each group faced and when I asked the guy who is the Ottawa police hate crimes unit (the “unit” is only one guy) – why that was, his answer made no sense. One thing he did say in an earlier conversation that did make sense was that the number of hate crimes against Black people is probably three times higher than what’s reported because Black people are likely reluctant to report incidents to the police because they have little faith the police will do anything.

In addition to weak to non-existent evaluation criteria, another way War on Hate initiatives support collective resistance is taking a really long time to produce anything to evaluate. Federal government consultations on the new Anti-Racism Strategy and Action Plan on Hate ended May 8, 2022 but the government web page on the initiative still says, “The Federal Anti-Racism Secretariat is currently synthesizing what they heard from communities across Canada in their various engagement sessions to inform the development of a new anti-racism action strategy for Canada.” 

Our definition of collective resistance is similar to the definition of system racism in Turner Consulting’s November 2023 report Systemic Anti-Black Racism by the Numbers: Canada vs the US:

“Systemic racism describes how policies, institutional practices, organizational culture, individual attitudes, and other norms within a system work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial inequity. Systemic racism is not something that a few people or organizations choose to practice. It is a key feature of our social, economic, and political systems.”

Interestingly, the only reference to the “War on Hate” that came up when I Googled it was Henry Kopel’s book War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom. Kopel is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative which bills itself as “a prominent international Canadian NGO that educates, advocates and publishes articles, reports and produces exhibits, symposiums and media content to counter Antisemitism; combat Holocaust denial; advance The Abraham Accords, defend Israel, Canada  and their allies;  and advance freedom, democracy and universal human rights.”

The “War on Hate” is focussed on the wrong enemy – by design. The real hate is in the actions taken everyday by the organizations, led by mostly white people making six figure salaries, that run programs that provide some relief while also supporting collective resistance against addressing systemic, state-led, anti-Black hate. These organizations get funding to provide Bandaid solutions to more serious societal issues. And if you’re in the Bandaid business – it’s in your interest for people to keep bleeding.

Categories
Europe Slavery Travel

Seeing what slavery built: my family’s European tour

My family and I recently returned from a European vacation, spending a few days in London, Paris, Barcelona and Rome. Members of my family had spent time in former colonies including Jamaica, the Bahamas, Mexico, Ghana and Brazil – so it was time to see what all that colonial wealth had built – and who was most benefiting from it today. We toured mostly on our own because we didn’t want to pay to have someone tell us an incomplete story about how all that great stuff got built. 

In London, we walked through Hyde Park passing Speakers Corner on the north-east side –  “where free speech, open-air public speaking, debate, and discussion are allowed…as long as the police consider their speeches lawful.” There was no one speaking when we went by.

We saw Buckingham Palace where newly crowned King Charles doesn’t actually live (he and Queen Camilla continue to live at his London home, Clarence House which is a 3-minute drive to the Palace). 

Buckingham Palace

The article The British Empire: From Profitable to Loss-Making on the UK-based website Historic Cornwall provides a succinct description of the origins of the wealth upon which the British Empire was built:

“The British Empire was one of the largest empires in history and at its peak controlled a territory that was home to over 400 million people…[it] was founded in the 16th century and for centuries it was incredibly profitable…due to the fact that the empire was built on the exploitation of natural resources and the labor of slaves. However, by the 19th century, many of the colonies had been exhausted of their resources and the slave trade had been abolished. This led to a decline in the profitability of the empire.”

So England no longer benefits off the labour of enslaved Black people. However, it still benefits from the labour of all tax paying Canadians, including Black ones, through what the Canadian government pays annually to support the British monarchy. According to the pro-Monarchy Monarchist League of Canada, British royalty “could cost taxpayers more than $58.7 million annually.” In a May 2023 CBC article, royal commentator and historian Rafe Heydel-Mankoo estimated King Charles’s coronation would cost Canadians between 50 million and 100 million pounds (about $85 million to $170.5 million Canadian dollars). 

Our walk ended up at Trafalgar Square that, “commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar, the British naval victory in the Napoleonic Wars over France and Spain that took place on October 21, 1805 off the coast of Cape Trafalgar.” The Battle of Trafalgar is what my African history teacher calls a “European tribal war”. According to a 2005 Socialist Worker article, “Britain’s rulers have reason to be grateful to Horatio Nelson for his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar 200 years ago this week, a victory that would be decisive for the creation of the British Empire. France and Britain had been fighting a long war for control of the world. This started when the French had their revolution in 1789 and chopped off their king’s head four years later. When they did that, Britain went to war with them. It was a war against revolution — a war for kings and to preserve the old power.”

We passed White Hall, “a street…recognised as the centre of the Government of the United Kingdom…lined with numerous departments and ministries. Consequently, the name “Whitehall” is used [to refer to]…the British civil service and government, and as the geographic name for the surrounding area.” I couldn’t help thinking how aptly named Whitehall is considering who no doubt occupied it, especially in its early days.

We saw The Tina Turner Musical in London’s West End – London’s Broadway –  where the almost all Black cast put on a great show for the almost all white audience. 

On our last day, we visited Brixton, “…a multi-ethnic community, with a large percentage of its population of Afro-Caribbean descent.” Emerging from the Brixton tube (i.e. subway) station we expected to encounter a scene similar to what we saw when we exited the subway in Harlem, New York in June of this year. There we saw lots of Black folks, many of whom appeared continental African and Muslim, bustling among lots of small stores. In Brixton, we emerged into a crowd with lots of white folks and big brand name stores and fast food places. We ate an indoor market with moderately priced restaurants of many varieties – but none Black owned from what we could tell. 

We went to the Black Cultural Archives and paid to see the exhibit Over A Barrel: Windrush Children, Tragedy and Triumph. Windrush refers to the “Windrush generation” which is a group of West Indians who arrived in London in June 1948 on the ship the HMT Empire Windrush. The Windrush “was a troopship en route from Australia to England via the Atlantic, docking in Kingston, Jamaica, in order to pick up servicemen who were on leave. An advertisement had appeared in a Jamaican newspaper offering cheap transport on the ship for anybody who wanted to travel to the United Kingdom.” Many Windrush immigrants left children behind who they helped out by sending them barrels of goods, earning their offspring the title “Barrel Children”. The exhibit focused on both Barrel Children – who had minimal contact with their parents beyond the barrels – and children born in Britain to Windrush parents. Some children eventually joined their parents in England and the exhibit, chronicled “the incredible journeys of children who traveled from the Caribbean to the UK during the Windrush era…exploring the profound impact of separation and reunion, isolation and belonging, as well as the cultural and social adjustments these children had to make in order to thrive in a hostile environment.”

On a much lighter note, we also visited the Twist Museum, a museum of visual illusions which was educational and entertaining (see pic below).

Our next stop was Paris where we saw displays of excessive wealth touring the Paris National Opera Garnier Palace and seeing Versailles Palace and the Louvre Museum from the outside. We didn’t buy Versailles tickets online beforehand so found a long line of tourists waiting to get into the sold out venue. 

Versaille is a former royal residence built by King Louis XIV. “About 15,000,000 people visit the palace, park, or gardens of Versailles every year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.” The opulence in all three places was striking and was starkly contrasted by the African men selling cheap Eiffel Tower models outside Versailles. The short film Dafa Metti (Difficult) gives voice to Senegalese men selling Eiffel Towers at the base of the actual Tower. They speak of making the dangerous sea voyage from France due to unemployment in Senegal. They try to sell enough trinkets to eat each day and, hopefully, make some extra to send money to family back home. If they’re lucky, they evade police. If not, some die trying.

As we did in London, we visited a section of Paris with a large Black population called La Goutte d’Or which translates to “The Drop of Gold”. Also known as Little Africa, it’s where you find African food, culture, and fashion and a large population of people from North and West Africa. Throughout the community, there are stores and street vendors selling food, spices, fabric for custom-made outfits and more. Looking from the street, most of the people behind the store counters appeared to be North African rather than West African…

Next stop was Barcelona where we started off with a self-guided tour of Castell de Montjuic which was built due to its raised altitude but which “far from protecting the city in fact bombed it during the 1842 insurrection when Barcelona rose up against the Spanish government in Madrid. The garrison continued to be a sinister symbol on high for the rest of the century and beyond, serving as a political prison and even a place of execution for dissidents such as Catalan nationalist Lluis Companys who was killed there in 1940 by Franco’s men.” A plaque in a less visited corner of the castle said that, when Catalan nationalists briefly took over Montjuic, they used it to execute their enemies.

We also saw La Sagrada Familia church and Park Güell, both designed by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. 

La Sagrada Familia

As the picture shows, La Sagrada is incredible. What it doesn’t show is what Richard Eiler wrote in his April 2016 Guardian article Barcelona’s slave trade history revealed on new walking tour, “The work of Antoni Gaudí in particular defines much of the city centre but few locals, let alone the tourists queueing to get into world-famous sights such as Palau Güell and Park Güell, know their dark secret: many were built with money made from the slave trade.” Eiler added, “Barcelona has a radical new mayor, Ada Colau, who made her name as a social activist, and the city council is supporting a new walking tour of places with a slave history.” We couldn’t find any signs that the walking tour still exists…

We travelled from London to Paris and from Paris to Barcelona via French SNCF trains with Eurail passes and loved that experience. The high speed trains were new, fast and on time. They were also extremely clean due to the great work of the cleaning staff who appeared to be exclusively continental Africans.

Our final stop was Rome where we did our one and only tour with a live tour guide. That started at Piazza Navona which featured yet another amazing fountain – but with a twist. This one has an obelisk with Egyptian hieroglyphics on it – but they weren’t written by Egyptians, they were written by Romans. Turns out the Romans liked the obelisks they took from Egypt so much, they created some of their own, including the Obelisk of Piazza Navona which dates back to the reign of Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 AD). So, as the Arab conquest of Egypt took place between 639 and 646 AD, Domitan and his buddies were ripping off obelisks – and modeling their own – based on ones built by Black Africans.

Without question, the most incredible structure we saw the entire trip was the Roman Colosseum, due to its size, what happened in it and how it happened. The Colosseum appears as big as modern day mega sports stadiums. According to Wikipedia, “It could hold an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 spectators at various points in its history, having an average audience of some 65,000; it was used for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles including animal hunts, executions, re-enactments of famous battles, and dramas based on Roman mythology, and briefly mock sea battles. Accounts of the inaugural games held by Titus in AD 80 describe it being filled with water for a display of specially trained swimming horses and bulls.”

I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between what happened in the Colosseum and sports like boxing, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA)…and football.

The only water we saw around the Colosseum was in bottles being sold by what appeared to be exclusively Indian men. Rather than African men, like in Paris, all the street vendors we saw in Rome were Indian men. And, like the African men, they all offered their goods once and didn’t ask again if we either didn’t reply or said no thanks. However, clearly other tourists have had different experiences which leads to posts like this from the From Home to Rome website:, “How to deal with street sellers in Rome – Tip no. 2: Ignore & keep walking. We can’t say this enough: whenever you are accosted by someone trying to sell you anything, you must ignore them. Don’t slow down because some African guy has complimented on your shoes or asked you where you’re from: it’s their “in” and they won’t leave you alone until they get money from you. Don’t acknowledge them, don’t make eye contact, don’t talk to them.” We made lots of eye contact, said no thanks, and had no issues. Assuming that, similar to the Senegalese men in Paris, if the Indian men don’t sell they don’t eat, they all showed an amazing amount of restraint in their sales pitch.

What we saw on our European journey supported what American journalist, author, and photographer Howard French argues in his October 2021 book Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War – the intentional obliteration of the central role of Africa in the creation of the West’s vast wealth.

It would be great if the tours of all the European monuments, statues, building and fountains, etc. were held to the same standard as court witnesses: to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Categories
Guiding Council Mental health

Alternative mental health crisis response system pilot won’t prevent people from ending up dead

On June 27, the City of Ottawa’s Community Services Committee approved a pilot project for an alternative mental health crisis response system that is supposed to be safer, especially for those in crisis. However, the Safer Alternatives for Mental Health and Substance Use Crises Response system won’t make anyone safer – it will lead to more people being killed.

The system was proposed by the Guiding Council and Mental and Addictions which was created by the Ottawa Police Service and the OPS is a member. When we and our community partners saw that, we immediately suspected that, with OPS influence, the Guiding Council would recommend an alternative mental health response system that did three things:

  • Leave the door open to continue dangerous levels of police involvement;
  • Wouldn’t involve taking any money from the police budget; and
  • Would take a really long time to implement.

And all three have come true.

First, the Guiding Council’s terms of reference says it aims for a system that will still send cops, “when the crisis is linked to criminal activity”. Well, that would include a situation like Abdirahman Abdi, a Black man with mental health issues who died in 2016 following police intervention. People called the cops on him because he was allegedly touching women in a coffee shop. And it would also include a situation like Greg Ritchie, an Indigenous man with mental health issues who people called the cops on because they said they saw a man with a knife that turned out to be a ceremonial tomahawk. Abdi and Greg would end up just as dead under the system currently being proposed by the Guiding Council – despite the OPS agreeing to initiate a mental health response strategy as part of the settlement reached with Abdi’s family.

Second, not a cent of the $2.5 million estimated project cost will come from the police budget. 

Furthermore, the City has tasked the police with seeking permanent funding for the program from other levels of government. That’s like if there was a security team in the mental health wing of a hospital that was killing people they were called to help so the hospital administration finally said, “Ok, ok. The people we send you to help keep ending up dead so we’re going to give that job to a new temporary team. But don’t worry – we’re going to keep paying you anyway…and, oh, can you ask other levels of governments for funding for a permanent program?”

And third, it took the Guiding Council two years to get to this point despite community-led efforts producing a report containing a complete template for a non-police mental health crisis response system in May 2021.  However, the report the Guiding Council presented to City Council – including the literature review – didn’t mention the report that the 613-819 Black Hub and Vivic Research published in June 2021 laying out a template for a system very similar to the Guiding Council’s proposal, but with one big difference: the Hub’s report recommended the absolute minimum police involvement in the new system.

Adding to these concerns is the fact that the Guiding Council developed the plan for the three-year pilot project with little transparency, including not holding their meetings publicly or making their meeting minutes public. We got their meeting minutes through Freedom of Information and they revealed why the level of police involvement the Guiding Council is permitting in their new system is so dangerous. 

The minutes included a story about an incident that happened while Guiding Council staff were interviewing Indigenous people in the market with an outreach worker from a local community group. The minutes said, “Two [Ottawa Police Service] members came into the group quite aggressively, and after a few minutes handcuffed an Indigenous man (most members of the group were Indigenous). [The outreach worker] advocated for the police to act appropriately and was himself arrested for obstruction.” 

It’s unclear how the current Guiding Council members were chosen but it’s telling that it doesn’t include any of the groups that are the strongest critics of the Ottawa Police Service…like the 613-819 Black Hub, Horizon Ottawa, the Coalition Against More Surveillance, the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, the Ottawa Black Diaspora Coalition, the Asilu Collective or Justice for Abdirahman.

If the City really wants to help people experiencing mental health crises, instead of continuing to contribute to them being harmed or killed, it will send the pilot project back for revision with an expanded Guiding Council that includes truly grassroots voices.

Categories
Corporations EDI

Anti-woke warriors are targeting the wrong enemy

Those who hate all things “woke” are targeting the wrong enemy. They attack trans people, Justin Trudeau, Black Lives Matter and anything related to diversity, equality and inclusion but they rarely, if ever, mention the entities that have done way more to mess up their lives – and restrict their “freedom”: corporations.

Take truckers for example. In February 2022, a bunch of them angrily occupied downtown Ottawa demanding an end to government COVID19 vaccine mandates. Many had F*&% Trudeau! signs and some of their leaders sought to overthrow the federal government in the name of “freedom”. However, none of them said anything about how the trucking companies they work for restrict their freedom. Why haven’t truckers tried to occupy Ottawa, or any other city, to protest the electronic logging devices (ELDs) federal regulation that came into force in January 2023 with the support of the trucking companies?

ELDs track a driver’s hours of service — the amount of time they can be behind the wheel on any given day. The regulation came into effect in June 2021 but Transport Canada only began enforcing it for certain commercial vehicle drivers, such as long-haul truckers, on Jan. 1, 2023. , ELDs have been required in the United States since 2017.

ELDs are billed as a way to make roads safer by keeping truckers accountable to their allowed hours of service. However, Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance says that the most vigorous study on the American rollout of ELDs showed they didn’t lead to any improvement in the most important safety outcomes. In fact, truck crashes didn’t decrease after the mandate began to be enforced—and for small carriers, they actually increased.

Furthermore, ELDs could be a canary in the coal mine for workplace surveillance experts say as they raise questions about what information employers are collecting about their workers. Levy says that the proliferation of ELDs has opened the doors for other monitoring systems that can monitor driving behaviours, like hard braking or swerving, and may include driver-facing cameras that use artificial intelligence to track eye movements and check for signs of drowsiness.

That seems like a way bigger attack on freedom than wearing a mask…

The May 1, 2023 Smart-Trucking.com article The Truck Driver Shortage – The Dirty Truth No One Talks About said, “The shortage of truck drivers is not due to the lack of individuals interested in becoming drivers. There are lots of potential drivers interested in becoming career truck drivers, but once many of them discover: the low pay, the lack of respect, the often poor working conditions, and the demands of the job – they abandon the idea.” These conditions have existed a lot longer than mask mandates so why haven’t we seen massive trucker protests against them? One reason might be that almost all truckers are men…

A quick reminder before proceeding that not all truckers supported the Ottawa occupation. CTV reported in January 2022 that “several trucking groups have also condemned the protests. The Canadian Trucking Alliance says nearly 85 per cent of drivers are fully vaccinated. Just before the convoy was about to kick off, the group said it “strongly disapproves of any protests on public roadways, highways, and bridges.””

The truckers who took part in the occupation were almost all white and it’s white heterosexual men who are leading the attack on all equity groups. Some blame women for their problems and fuel the popularity of men like Andrew Tate. But, as with most movements driven partly by anger, the reasons behind it are much more complex than the reasons offered by the movement’s leaders.

In his January 2023 New Yorker article What’s the Matter with Men?, Idress Kahloon writes, “Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.”

Kahloon cites the work of British American scholar of inequality and social mobility Richard V. Reeves from his latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. In the book Reeves argues that “the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn [have negatively impacted men]… Reeves sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration, and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates.”

In response to these very real and complex issues, people like Andrew Tate simply say “it’s women’s fault”. An April 2023 NewsWeek article quoted Tate promising to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” It also said he has been banned from Twitter twice for arguing that women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted by men. Expressing this and similar views has earned his videos billions of views.

On the gender wage gap, Tate’s view isn’t what you might first think: that it’s justified because men deserve to be paid more. It’s that there isn’t one. It appears (and wouldn’t be surprising) that Tate hasn’t read either Kahloon’s article or Reeves’ book as they say there’s a gender pay gap and provide one very clear reason why. Kahloon writes, “Within occupations, there’s often no wage gap until women have children and reduce their work hours. “For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite,” Reeves observes. “For most men, it barely makes a dent.”” Tate, and all those like him, ignore these inconvenient, complex realities…probably because they don’t make for good YouTube videos. Tate, of course, doesn’t critique ideas of how to get rid of the wage gap because he doesn’t think one exists.

Kahloon does provide one solution for the wage gap from Harvard labor economist Claudia Goldin who says the gender gap, “…would vanish if long, inflexible work days and weeks weren’t profitable to employers.” As expected, Tate doesn’t critique corporations’ role in maintaining the “non-existent” gender wage gap. 

People like Tate and Jordan Peterson don’t criticize corporations at all. In fact, Peterson indirectly frames corporations as the victims by implicitly including them in his defence of organizations being targeted by what he sees as EDI zealots. As I said in my post Jordan Peterson wants us to shut up about D.I.E., deliver his Amazon packages and DIE, Peterson mistakenly accuses “equity-pushers” of claiming “that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systemic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) is definitely at play, and that there are perpetrators who should be limited or punished that have or are currently producing that prejudice.” 

The only example I could find of Peterson critiquing corporations was him chastising CEOs for “lining up to kowtow at the D.I.E. altar.” But, similar to his critique of employment equity, what he’s critiquing isn’t really that much of a thing. Evidence shows that, in Canada, corporate EDI efforts have been largely reactive and performative. For example, the Globe and Mail has reported each year on the lack of success of the Black North Initiative which was launched in summer 2020 with the mission to get corporate Canada to Blacken up their C-suites. Little has changed in the C-suites but much has changed in the Black North Initiative’s stated mandate which is now, “..to end anti-Black systemic racism throughout all aspects of our lives by utilizing a business-first mindset.”

Why don’t Tate and Peterson critique those in corporate Canada who helped make men more insecure by causing unionization among men to fall by 16 per cent over the last 40 years according to Statistics Canada? (StatsCan says the percentage of employees who were union members in their main job fell from 38% in 1981 to 29% in 2022.) 

But the more disturbing question is why do so many men uncritically consume Tate and Peterson’s content, much of which is so flawed? Could it be that what Tate and Peterson say allows them to blame anyone but them for their problems? If so, we gotta get far more effective at educating these guys on who to hate.

Categories
OPSB

The Ottawa Police Services Board doesn’t want to hear public delegates – and doesn’t care what people say when they do

I just spoke at the Ottawa Police Services Board, as I do almost every month. Below is what I said…

“Well, here we are at the first meeting being held under the draconian and authoritarian new rules you all voted to implement at your last meeting. But, before I continue, let me define what draconian and authoritarian mean because I suspect some of you don’t know. Draconian means “excessively harsh and severe” and authoritarian means, “favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.” Let me also state for the record what changes you made to public delegations. You limited delegations to only one hour when there was never a limit on the total # of delegations before. You kept delegations to 5 minutes but, under your new rules, if more than 12 people sign up for the hour time slot, each delegate will be cut to 3 minutes. You said you are giving priority to people who haven’t spoken in the last 3 months, which appears to directly target myself and other activists who make the effort to speak regularly. And, finally, you now require people to submit their remarks in writing beforehand. And, although even your own motion doesn’t say we have to provide our written remarks word-for-word, Chair Valiquet is forcing us to even though that’s not what you voted for.

Now, you said you wanted our written remarks beforehand so you could better prepare to engage with delegates and, seeing as I complied and sent you my remarks 3 weeks ago, and because I suspect that I am one of a few, if not the only, delegate today because of these new rules, I certainly won’t waste the Board’s valuable time reading my remarks now but will, instead, spend the rest of my time taking your questions.”

Not one Board member asked a question. What follows are the full written remarks I sent the Board March 3:

“You said you made these changes so the Board can have time to do its important work of ensuring Ottawa has adequate and effective police services. So seeing as you just gave the OPS a $15 million raise I will spend the rest of my time talking about how effective – or not – the OPS is.

The OPS is very effective at its own propaganda. We saw an example of that last month when, during Black History Month, Chief Stubbs attended a service at Parkdale United Church where George Floyd’s brother Terrence spoke. And I gotta hand it to you, that was a brilliant PR move. A photo op with George Floyd’s brother, with former police chief Peter Sloly on one side and Ottawa community activist Gwen Madida on the other. Too bad it got zero attention. What also got little attention was what happened to Gwen a few days later. A few days later Gwen posted a picture of her bloodied face saying she and a young Black man she was with had just been assaulted by a white man who called them the N-word repeatedly while he was doing it.

And the whole thing was caught on video…Gwen called the police…so was their response an example of effective policing? Did they charge the man with a hate crime like they rightly charged the students who committed the act of antisemitism at an Ottawa high school last fall? We still don’t know and this really makes us question how effective the OPS hate crime unit is.

So we question how effective the OPS is at stopping people from hurting Black people…and we also question how effective the OPS is at stopping young Black men from hurting and killing each other. We know the OPS has a Guns and Gangs unit that had 22 officers as of last year. So, how many guns did the Guns and Gangs unit seize last year…especially those from the US? We ask because in July last year media reports said that of all the handguns involved in crimes in Canada that were traced in 2021, 85% came from the U.S.

We tried to find out more about this but couldn’t find anything on the OPS website giving any detail at all about the success – or lack thereof – of the Guns and Gangs unit. And there’s no point filing a Freedom of Information request because the OPS has denied every one we’ve submitted.

Why would the OPS make it so hard to find out how effective they’re being at reducing the numbers of illegal guns in neighborhoods where lots of young Black men live? 

But let’s change focus and look at how effective the OPS is at addressing one of the main issues identified by the majority of Ottawa residents: traffic. The OPS budget you approved last month says that, in multiple public surveys, Ottawa residents identified road safety as a top concern and that it remains a number one priority for the OPS. However, during the March 1 budget meeting, Councillor Sean Devine said he had spoken to Deputy Chief Bell about his constituents’ concerns about traffic and that the Deputy Chief had told him policing is not the answer to speeding and road safety. Really? Even with a budget of more than $400 million dollars that includes 37 officers in the Traffic Services Unit? Do you really think that is effective?

Perhaps the OPS will spend some of their $15 million increase on some expensive traffic tech saying that it will increase their effectiveness. Because that’s what they tell us about tech like body cameras. The OPS says body cameras will reduce police violence. But, in June 2020, Ottawa Police Service Board acting chair Sandy Smallwood asked Chief Sloly his opinion on body cameras and the Chief said research was mixed at best on how useful the cameras are at decreasing use of force by officers. He also said that the financial impact of the pandemic on the police force would mean trade-offs would need to be made between investments in body cameras and other OPS and board priorities. Chief Stubbs acknowledged the conflicting body camera research at the Board’s February meeting – then you and Ottawa City Council approved the budget that includes a body camera pilot project – and everything else the OPS asked for. No trade offs needed. Our view is that, rather than helping to make the OPS more effective, body cameras will just lead to more trauma porn.

So, despite all the evidence of the OPS’ ineffectiveness, you gave them a $15 million dollar raise. And you did that even after Justice Rouleau released his report on the Ottawa trucker occupation that countered the leaked OPS narrative that the OPS failure was all former Chief Sloly’s fault. The report says, “Much of the focus of the evidence was on Chief Sloly. It is all too easy to attribute all of the deficiencies in the police response solely to him but this would be unfortunate and indeed, inconsistent with the evidence. As well, some errors on Chief Sloly’s part were unduly enlarged by others to a degree that suggests scapegoating.” 

So if Chief Sloly wasn’t solely responsible, who else was? We don’t know because you haven’t done your job and asked those questions. You just gave millions more to the OPS despite the fact that the OPS’s own data shows they spend less than 1% of their time responding to Priority 1 calls where there’s imminent threat of bodily harm.  Meaning, armed OPS officers spend 99% of their time doing things like directing traffic, babysitting construction sites and responding to mental health calls. They also spend much of their time over-policing marginalized people including moving unhoused people away from businesses and using force disproportionately on Black, Middle Eastern and Indigenous people.

So because you’re not fulfilling your mandate to ensure effective policing in Ottawa and you’re limiting public input that would help you do your job properly we’re filing a complaint against the Board with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

It’s time to continue reimagining community safety in Ottawa by finally giving up on the myth of reforming the OPS and freezing the OPS budget pending the outcome of the line-by-line audit of all city services, including the OPS.”

Categories
EDI

Jordan Peterson wants us to shut up about D.I.E., deliver his Amazon packages and DIE

I attended former University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson’s January 30 talk at the Canadian Tire Centre with what appeared to be about 5000 white people. Peterson has risen to fame doing things like calling “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion”, “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” or DIE. And he hates DIE. I mean he really hates it.

In a January 2022 National Post article Peterson said, “Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough.”

Peterson believes the current system has some flaws but essentially works on “meritorious selection”. He implies that white people, especially white men, dominate so many places because they have pulled up their boot straps and risen to that level on their own merit. He says things like employment equity (or affirmative action in the US) are misguided and lead to unqualified members of equity seeking groups getting hired because, “there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke).” 

Peterson’s claim that there aren’t enough qualified brown folks demonstrates his poor understanding of Canada’s federal Employment Equity Act. The Act does set EE group hiring targets for federally regulated organizations but those targets are based on the percentage of qualified members of those groups available in the workforce, known as workforce availability. 

So if, for example, a department is looking to hire engineers, and 7 percent of qualified engineers available in the workforce are women, they must try to achieve 7 percent female engineers in their organization. So saying there aren’t enough qualified people to meet the target makes no sense when the target directs organizations to choose only from pools of qualified candidates.

Peterson’s hate of EDI is rooted in two central beliefs: that society should prioritize individual – not group – rights and responsibilities, and that society should be based on equality of opportunity not equality of outcome.

The first belief focuses on “groups” like LGBTQ+ folks or women, asking for rights and Peterson opposing that with really logical sounding (at first) quotes like, “Groups can’t have rights because no group can be held responsible.” So what about things like the Persons case that gave women the right to be legally recognized as persons? Or what about when slavery was abolished and gave Black people the right not to be owned? In both cases it was individual women or Black people who were granted rights because of being part of a group – a critical nuance Peterson misses. 

But what about group responsibility? Peterson is right about not being able to hold groups responsible, but that’s not the point – it’s the individuals who are held responsible. Again, in the case of Black people and employment equity, individuals are held responsible for things like being honest about their qualifications and meeting their job requirements. If they don’t, they get fired (you can’t fire a group).

Peterson’s “equality of outcome” point is partly based on his misunderstanding of workforce availability and the evidence members of equity groups give to demonstrate the existence of systemic discrimination. 

Peterson says organizations like universities are forced to provide equality of outcome by being required to have the same percentage of each equity group at every staff level as the percentage of that equity group in the population. And he says that if the organizations fail to meet that target, equity groups accuse them of systemic discrimination and that’s too simplistic a way to claim systemic discrimination.

First, as explained before, Employment Equity Act hiring targets are based on workforce availability of qualified candidates, not the percentage of that group in the general population. Second, most equity groups’ claims of systemic discrimination are based on decades of empirical data that they had to fight to get collected – not assumptions.

Peterson sees Western society as having some flaws but being the merit based best system in the world that has improved the lives of millions of people. He ignores the fact that two of the “flaws” – slavery and Indigenous genocide – are the foundation of the West’s wealth. He also ignores the glaring evidence of current systemic inequity: all the brown people working in low paying, gig economy jobs at places like Walmart, Amazon and Uber.

Peterson and his followers reflect a disturbing trend. They enjoy lifestyles in a system that causes and/or aggravates problems that disproportionately affect marginalized folks, like climate change or all the systemic issues that led to COVID disproportionately killing racialized people. However, they aggressively resist collective solutions to these problems – especially those led by government – as violations of their freedom. The Ottawa “Freedom Convoy” occupation was an example of this.

Peterson and his supporters just want to be left alone – with occasional interruptions from all the brown, mostly immigrant people – who clean their hotel rooms and deliver their Amazon packages and Uber Eats. And they don’t want to talk at all about their role in contributing to the systemic discrimination that severely limits the choices – and therefore the freedom – of so many racialized people, corralling them into those low paying jobs – and keeping them there.

Categories
EDI Police reform

It’s time to give up on the myth of police reform

On February 23, we got more concrete evidence that trying to reform the police doesn’t work – and never will. Researchers with the Tracking Injustice project released their preliminary data on police-involved killings in Canada revealing there have been more than 700 police use-of-force deaths in Canada since the year 2000. And Black and Indigenous people accounted for 27% of those deaths, although a lack of race statistics means the real percentage could be much higher. So, despite the increased budgets for more training, hiring more officers – especially diverse ones – and expanding community policing, the cops keep killing people, especially Black and Indigenous people.

Police and their supporters keep telling us that the police need to be reformed, not abolished. They say we must be patient because “these things take time” but change will come. Yet, the evidence tells another story.

In May 2022, the Ottawa Police Service released its use-of-force race data showing they use force disproportionately on Black, Middle Eastern and Indigenous people. OPS Deputy Chief Bell presented the use-of-force race data as if they had collected it voluntarily. They didn’t. The Ontario government ordered them to collect it over two years ago just like the Ontario Human Rights Commission ordered them to collect race-based traffic stop data back in 2013. And nine years later the result is the same: the OPS treats Black, Indigenous and Middle Eastern people worse. Nine years of reform – more training, hiring more diverse officers, and expanding community policing – has done little to stop the police from disproportionately harming brown marginalized people.

Last year provided some of the strongest evidence of why the Ottawa Police Service in particular is beyond reform. 

2022 started with the “Freedom Convoy” occupation in Ottawa where the Ottawa police stood around doing nothing for the first three weeks. Then came the resignation of Ottawa’s first Black police chief, Peter Sloly, accompanied by media stories quoting “unnamed” OPS sources using the standard – and very racist – angry Black man narrative accusing Sloly of bullying and volatile behaviour that compromised the force’s ability to cope with the truck protest. Sloly had faced racist resistance from day one after he began making changes to address systemic racism and sexism among other issues. The Ottawa Police Services Board hired Sloy’s replacement, Eric Stubbs, three days before Ottawa’s election, despite calls to postpone the hiring until after the vote. And the Board didn’t just hire any guy to replace Sloly. They hired the guy who led the BC RCMP’s operation to violently remove Wet’suwet’en people protesting a pipeline being built on their land.

So, before diversity at the very top could fundamentally change the Ottawa Police Service – the OPS got rid of the diversity. Yet, the new chief keeps saying diversity and inclusion is one of the OPS’ priorities and that they plan to ensure plenty of diversity among the 25 new officers they plan to hire. But having a more diverse workforce didn’t stop five Black Memphis police officers from beating Tyre Nichols to death in January of this year. The OPS issued a statement condemning those officers supposedly because OPS officers would never be caught on video viciously beating a Black man who later died…well, except for Abdirahman Abdi.

More diverse officers don’t change policing – policing changes them. It changes them even if they work with units with nice, euphemistic names like SCORPION, the Street Crime Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhood – or Neighborhood Resource Teams, like the OPS calls its latest “community policing” initiative. It changes them. And we will soon have data that will likely back this up… 

In November, 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission welcomed changes Ontario’s Solicitor General had made to police use-of-force reporting form including allowing it to “capture important contextual information about use of force incidents, such a…demographic details about the officer who submitted the report, such as their age, race, and gender identity.” (They also added the capability to collect factors that informed the reporting officer’s perception of the subject’s race, the subject’s perceived age and gender identity, de-escalation options used by the officer and the level of physical control used.) The problem is the word “allow”. If officers aren’t mandated to include their race, they likely won’t.

Another popular reform that people argue will reduce police violence are body cameras – especially after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. In June 2020, Ottawa Police Service Board acting chair Sandy Smallwood, told former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly that the Board had received several emails from members of the public demanding body-worn cameras for police officers and asked Sloly his opinion on them. In a July 2020 Ottawa Citizen article Sloly said research was “mixed at best” on how useful the cameras are at decreasing use of force by officers and that the financial impact of the pandemic on the police force would mean trade-offs would need to be made between any investments in (body-worn cameras) and other OPS and board priorities currently underway. 

Ottawa’s new police chief, Eric Stubbs, acknowledged the conflicting body camera research at the Ottawa Police Services Board’s February 2023 meeting – then the Board and Ottawa City Council approved the budget that includes a body camera pilot project – and everything else the OPS asked for. No trade-offs needed.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that reforms don’t work, some Black folks, including some very high profile ones, continue to advocate for reform.

In February, during Black History Month, George Floyd’s brother Terrence visited Ottawa and spoke at two events. In an interview on the popular Breakfast Club podcast he explained why his Brooklyn, New York-based We Are Floyd Foundation partners with the New York Police Department, “I want to change the narrative….I want to bring the narrative back from my era where you had the police playing basketball with us…you had them understanding our culture and our community…I mean you had the bad apples but the majority…we saw them interact with us.”

There are several problems with brother Floyd’s position. The first is that the narrative he wants to change “back” to is the one the police have been pushing for years – and still are. That is the idea that the problem is only because of “a few bad apples” and that the solution is increasing “community policing”. However, despite increasing police budgets being used to hire more diverse officers (i.e. good apples) and expanded community policing, the police continue to shoot and kill unarmed Black people – including 61 people – and counting – since George Floyd’s murder.

A student who heard Terrence Floyd speak in Ottawa was quoted saying that, “hearing from Black leaders in the community and from Floyd is motivation to continue conversations around equity, diversity and inclusion. Change doesn’t take place overnight, but seeing how the eyes are open towards the issue is beautiful.” This idea that talking is the way to end systemic oppression and that those talks take time to have impact, is core to the idea of reform. And that’s because reform is a way to give the appearance of change without actually making any fundamental change.

That’s what’s led to the explosion of the diversity and inclusion illusion: performative change that looks good – but doesn’t actually change anything.

And the ironic thing is that there is such a huge push back against equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives despite so much of it being performative. Popular anti EDI commentator, Jordan Peterson, got so popular attacking EDI that he left his job as a tenured psychology professor at the University of Toronto to write books and make YouTube videos and do stadium tours promoting his content.

Police love reform because it means more money. More money to hire more diverse officers. More money for training. More money for body cameras and…more money for performative EDI that changes nothing. 

It’s time to give up on the myth of police reform and continue defunding the police and reimagining community safety.

Note: After I posted and shared this post, a fellow abolitionist shared a great article by Critical Resistance distinguishing between reformist reforms which continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact. Some of the abolitionist steps include suspending the use of paid administrative leave for cops under investigation, prioritizing spending on community health, education and affordable housing and decreasing the size of the police force.

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613-819 Black Hub Year in review

2022 – Another busy year for the Hub!

2022 was another busy year that saw the Hub work on issues related to education, health, business, municipal politics, addressing anti-Black racism nationally, climate change, Black federal public servants, police/criminal justice and more! 

Education – As a member of the Ottawa Carleton District School Board’s Valuing Voices Technical Advisory Group, the Hub continued to help the Board develop the best ways to share the identity-based data it collected in 2019. The data covers suspensions, sense of belonging at school and Grade 10 credit accumulation among other things. The data is a key tool for advocating for change so it’s crucial to make it as accessible and easy to use as possible for the public. One of the focuses this year was to figure out the schedule for refreshing the data on a regular basis.

The Hub also presented at the May Board meeting where trustees unanimously defeated a motion to reinstate the School Resource Officer program. The Board had ended the SRO program in 2021 after it did a human rights-based evaluation that found the program had been harmful to Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ students.

A Hub representative was part of the Loran Scholarship assessment team. The $100,000 Loran Scholarship was founded in 1988 as the first national undergraduate award based on a mix of academic achievement, extracurricular activity and leadership potential. However, no one the Hub spoke with had heard about it and we noticed there weren’t many Black faces among the pictures of past Loran scholars. Being part of the assessment team, which we will continue doing, allows us to help get more Black students to possibly get scholarships.

Health – The Hub was a member of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership’s Health and Wellbeing Sector Table. The group met regularly during the COVID-19 pandemic to share data on Black communities aimed at overcoming barriers to getting more Black folks vaccinated.

We also presented our Non-Police Mental Health Crisis Response for the City of Ottawa report to the Guiding Council on Mental Health and Addictions. The Ottawa Police Service created the Guiding Council in January 2021. It was moved under the City after public outcry about the police leading the initiative. The Council’s stated mandate is “to establish a strategy to support an enhanced or new Mental Health and Addiction crisis response system that will improve the outcomes for those experiencing crises related to mental health and substance use in the City of Ottawa.” However, its terms of reference say it’s working towards a system that will still include police “when the crisis is linked to criminal activity…”. 

People called for a different system partly because of the police-involved deaths of Abdirahman Abdi and Greg Ritchie. People called the police on Abdi because he was allegedly touching women in a coffee shop and on Greg Ritchie, an Indigenous man, because they said they saw a man with a knife – that turned out to be a ceremonial tomahawk. As touching women and carrying knives are both criminal activities, both men would likely end up just as dead under the “new” system the Guiding Council is working to create. The Council’s terms of reference say nothing about shifting money now spent on mental health response from the OPS to other organizations once the OPS stops doing it. The Hub presented our detailed plan for a system that involves no police and will shift money saved to social services that address the root causes of criminal activity.

We also attended the excellent Mental Health of Black Communities conference hosted by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Black Health and the Vulnerability, Trauma, Resilience & Culture Research Laboratory (V-TRaC), led by Dr. Jude Mary Cénat.

Business – Ever since cannabis was legalized the Hub has been saying Black folks should get into the business that’s now dominated by white men. With this in mind, the Hub attended Health Canada’s 2022 Cannabis Licensing – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Forum focussed on diversifying the industry. Afterwards, we connected with Michael and Ashley Athill, brother/sister owners/founders of HRVSTR Cannabis. We spoke about how the Hub could find a place in the industry with our skill set. Right now we’re working on a business model that would have us work to help people clear their criminal pot records and get into the business. They would then give the Hub a cut of their profits.

The Hub also attended the launch of, and a two-day conference on, the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub to learn about the latest data on Black business – and connect with some of the key folks producing it.

Municipal politics – The Hub participated in Ottawa’s Oct. 24 election by attending debates and asking candidates questions focused on Black community interests and helping organize a school trustee meet and greet. We created a document with information on candidates’ position on key issues of concern to Black Ottawa residents, canvassed door-to-door and had a rep as a panelist on Rogers TV Ottawa’s election night panel. 

Federal government – The Hub led the push for the Government of Canada to appoint a Black Equity Commissioner similar to the permanent Special Envoy on antisemitism and new Special Representative on Islamophobia it announced in its 2022 Budget. Beyond the obvious reason of simple equity, there are other reasons for appointing a Black Equity Commissioner. Firstly, with a little under two years left in the U.N. Decade for People of African Descent, which runs from 2015-2024, the Commissioner will help ensure addressing anti-Black racism remains a federal focus after the Decade ends. Secondly, with Statistics Canada reporting that Black Canadians faced the most hate crimes in Canada in 2020 and other data showing Black Canadians continue to be disproportionately negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of affordable housing, under-employment and other social determinants of health the Commissioner is more essential than any moment in recent history to safeguard and expand substantive equality rights for Black people. In December, the Hub called for the Black Equity Commissioner at the Black Parliamentary Caucus pre-budget consultation in Ottawa, got an opinion piece published in the Ottawa Citizen and reached out nationally to get support for the commissioner from Black groups.

Climate change – The Hub spoke in September at the Ottawa chapter of the global Climate Strike in Ottawa the theme of which was “Together for Climate Justice”. The Hub pointed out how the reports from the international Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, and mainstream press reports about climate change say climate change started with, and continues to be caused by, “human activity” and how “we” must all come together to fix it. These reports make it sound like all humans contributed equally to starting climate change and are all contributing equally to making it worse. In fact, the climate crisis has its origins in the actions of a select group of humans responsible for the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of African people, colonialism and capitalism. That select group of humans forced millions of enslaved Africans to work – sometimes literally to death – on mono-culture plantations that destroyed the soil. That same group drove the Industrial Revolution that was literally launched, and fuelled, by the violently coerced labour of enslaved Africans and created capitalism which, in its global excesses, values profits above people and the planet and has led us to the climate crisis we have today. 

Policing/criminal justice – The Hub continued its efforts to push for City Council and the Ottawa Police Services Board to reimagine public safety in Ottawa. We issued a news release and did several media interviews about the resignation of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly in the midst of the “Freedom Convoy”. We questioned the racist, angry Black man narrative leaked by OPS sources accusing Sloly of bullying and volatile behaviour that compromised the force’s ability to cope with the truck protest. We also presented regularly at Ottawa Police Services Board meetings calling for them to move money from the police to social services that actually make us all safer like housing and mental health. Just like journalist Desmond Cole had taken over a Toronto Police Services Board meeting in 2017 to demand the Toronto Police delete the data they collected from carding Black Torontonians, we took over the November 30 Ottawa Police Services Board meeting and refused to leave until they answered questions related to accountability of the Ottawa Police Service. Shortly after, we attended the OPS’ 7th Annual Human Rights Learning Forum and asked questions related to the issues we raised when we took over the OPSB meeting. Finally, we filed several complaints against the OPSB and OPS leadership with the Ontario Civilian Police Commission and the Office of the Independent Police Review Director for actions that helped the police but harmed public safety.

International – The Hub provided input to the Canadian delegation attending the first meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent in Dec. 5-7 in Geneva. The Forum will be an advisory body to the UN Human Rights Council, in line with the program of activities for the implementation of the UN International Decade for People of African Descent, which runs from 2015 to 2024.

In addition to all this, we supported local initiatives including:

  • Attending the Oct. 7 candlelight vigil for Anthony Aust marking the 2nd anniversary of his death following an Ottawa police raid on his 12th floor apartment
  • Joining graduating Black students on their symbolic Walk of Excellence from Lisgar High School to the University of Ottawa
  • Attending the federal Black Class Action’s press conference with Amnesty International where they announced they were filing a complaint with the United Nations regarding the status of Blacks in Canada.
  • Attending the Brotherhood Coalition’s Let’s Talk Black Men’s Mental Health BBQ
  • Attending the 3rd National Black Canadians Summit in Halifax 
  • Having a Hub table at the 2nd HorizonFest community group gathering hosted by our partner group Horizon Ottawa.
  • Meeting with the heads of Queen’s University Black Studies program to discuss how Blackademics and Blacktivists can work together 
  • Attending the inauguration of Awad Ibrahim as the first Air Canada Chair on Anti-Racism
  • Working with the international Can’t Buy My Silence campaign against the misuse of non-disclosure agreements to hide human rights abuses
  • Being a member of the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa’s Race and Faith Based Advisory Committee addressing the over representation of Black youth in care
  • Hub coordinator Robin Browne co-hosting rabble.ca’s monthly Off the Hill political panel
  • Supporting Jaku Konbit’s mentorship program by mentoring a Black youth and attending program meetings.
  • Speaking to university and high school social justice classes

It was a busy year and we look forward to continuing the work in 2023!