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Public transit Transformative justice

Transformative justice: making Ottawa’s transit system safer

Finding transformative justice safety solutions presents some of the same challenges as finding any solution: finding things that might work where you are and evaluating if what you tried works. Evaluating what works also presents one basic challenge if your initiative is one of many things being tried. If nothing changes, you know everything failed, including your initiative. However, if things get better it’s sometimes hard to know how much of the improvement, if any, is due to your thing. Another challenge is that knowing if “things got better” regarding safety requires measuring changes in peoples’ actual, and perceived, safety.

My next few blog posts will explore these challenges regarding safety issues in Ottawa, starting with public transit safety.

Since August 2024, there have been several incidents on Ottawa’s O-Train commuter system that have raised safety concerns:

  • August 2024 – Ottawa Police sought a suspect for an assault that occurred on August 27, 2024, on a train. At approximately 3:00 pm, the victim was walking toward a seat on the train, when the suspect pushed past and struck them. An altercation ensued and the suspect exited the train and fled the area on foot. The victim sustained minor injuries.
  • September 2024 – A 26-year-old man was charged by the Ottawa police hate and bias crime unit for allegedly assaulting four people in separate incidents on OC Transpo buses and trains, while uttering “hate-filled” comments, leaving all four victims seriously injured.
  • November 2024 – Two men were sentenced to prison in December 2025 for a “venomous” and “hate-filled” attack on a 28-year-old Black man at Ottawa’s Hurdman Station on November 16, 2024. The attackers used racial slurs, a knife, and a dog during the attack, which was found to be motivated by anti-Black hate.
  • April 2025 – Ottawa police charged five youths following an alleged swarming of a lone woman at the Rideau O-Train station platform on April 25, 2025.

These attacks happened despite Ottawa’s transit service, OC Transpo, having several safety measures in place, including:

  • Special Constables, who are sworn peace officers with powers similar to police;
  • System-wide monitoring and dispatch including security camera operators monitoring vehicles and stations and call-takers and dispatchers coordinating responses;
  • The Transecure program which aims to make all transit staff part of the safety network with bus operators and other employees trained to handle medical emergencies, suspicious activity, fires, accidents, and threats; and
  • Environmental and operational measures, including well-lit “Night Stop” areas at stations after 9 p.m., the “Safe Stop” program allowing riders to request to get off closer to home at night, emergency phones placed throughout stations and visible patrols to increase perceived safety.

So what could Ottawa do to make public transit safer? Several Canadian cities have taken non-police measures that could provide guidance.

1. Toronto Transit Commission – Community safety ambassadors, outreach workers, crisis teams, and station staff

Toronto adopted a “community safety and well-being” model that integrates social services and non-enforcement staff into the transit system.

Key non-police components:

  • Community safety ambassadors and additional TTC staff in stations
  • Mental-health crisis teams (Toronto Community Crisis Service)
  • Streets to Homes outreach workers for people experiencing homelessness
  • Multi-disciplinary outreach teams (LOFT)
  • De-escalation training for frontline transit staff
  • Public awareness campaigns and safety communication

Reported impact:

  • Offences against customers down 28% since Dec. 2022
  • Offences against employees down 38% since Jan. 2023
  • Safety complaints down 56%
  • Rider perception of safety increased from 57% to 64%

2. Saskatoon Transit – Public awareness campaign targeting assaults

Saskatoon implemented a public awareness campaign focused on respect for transit workers as part of a broader safety plan.

Key non-police elements:

  • Campaign featuring real transit operators sharing experiences
  • Ads and videos promoting respect for drivers and workers
  • Collaboration with the transit union to change rider behaviour

Results:

  • Operator assaults dropped from 9 in the first half of 2024 to 0 in the second half.
  • Rider confidence and employee perceptions of safety increased.

3. Calgary Transit – Ambassadors, lighting, and social-service partnerships

Calgary has implemented a transit ambassador program and environmental design improvements.

Key non-police elements:

  • Transit ambassadors who help riders and report issues
  • Improved lighting and station visibility
  • Expanded cleaning and maintenance
  • Partnerships with community outreach teams and shelters
  • Support for people sheltering in stations during extreme weather

City of Calgary surveys showed improved rider perceptions of safety, May-November 2023, with:

  • Daytime CTrain safety perception rising from 67% to 72%;
  • Feeling safe waiting at stations (day) rising from 64% to 70%; and 
  • Night-time safety perception also improving (riding: 33% to 39%; waiting: 27% to 34%)

Calgary also reported that social disorder incidents on the city’s CTrains like fights, insults, open drug use and overdoses were down between Oct. 1, 2023 and Dec. 15, 2023, numbering 3,450 incidents, compared with 4,146 in the same period in 2022.

4. Edmonton Transit Service – Bystander intervention and anti-harassment campaigns

Edmonton implemented a Safe City campaign focused on reducing harassment and gender-based violence.

Key non-police elements:

  • Gender-based safety planning (GBA+) including gender-based violence bystander-awareness education campaigns
  • Collaboration with community groups and Indigenous organizations

Ottawa doesn’t currently use transit ambassadors or have a 24/7 mental health crisis response system that covers the entire city (like Toronto’s Community Crisis Service).

Toronto’s Streets to Homes program is a single, city-operated 24/7 street outreach program that directly connects people to housing and follow-up supports and is highly centralized and integrated. Ottawa has outreach teams doing very similar work but the system is decentralized, delivered by multiple agencies funded by the city. 

Toronto has Multidisciplinary Outreach Teams (M-DOTs), focused on health, housing and outreach providing a continuous street presence and long-term engagement with highly vulnerable people, operated by LOFT Community Services. Ottawa provides similar services to the M-DOT teams but lacks a single, unified, multidisciplinary street outreach team operating at scale. Instead, Ottawa services are spread across various services including crisis teams (Ottawa Hospital Mobile Crisis Team (MCT), Alternate Neighbourhood Crisis Response (ANCHOR), clinical outreach (Royal Ottawa Hospital) and housing/case management (Canadian Mental Health Association).

Saskatoon and Ottawa have done public awareness campaigns targeting staff safety. In 2023, Edmonton Transit Service launched its One Strong Voice Bystander Awareness Campaign aimed at reducing gender-based violence and harassment in transit and other public spaces. OC Transpo doesn’t currently have an awareness campaign specifically targeting violence against riders.

Given all this, could Ottawa’s transit system be made safer by implementing some, or all, of the following:

  • Community safety ambassadors;
  • A public awareness campaign targeting violence against riders;
  • A city-wide, 24/7 mental health crisis response system; and/or
  • A single, unified, multidisciplinary street outreach team operating at scale

What resources would be needed for the City to implement these and how would the City evaluate their effectiveness – and sustainability?

Community safety ambassadors

ChatGPT says it would cost Ottawa $3-5 million a year to implement a community safety ambassador program like Toronto’s with 40-60 ambassadors, covering the LRT + major bus hubs. That doesn’t sound like much and that’s partly because Toronto ambassadors are employed by West Egg Security that pays them $18/hr, barely above Ontario’s $17.60/hr minimum wage. That’s not transformative justice. That’s exploitation. Someone whose job duties include engaging with unhoused individuals and connect them with support resources, offering trauma-informed de-escalation support when clients are in distress, collecting and disposing of harm-reduction supplies and reporting suspicious observations and activities to security and the proper authorities, shouldn’t paid the same as someone working at Tim Horton’s. Properly compensated ambassadors could be part of the solution.

City-wide, 24/7 mental health crisis response system

ChatGTP said it would cost Ottawa $9-15 million dollars a year to expand its current mental health crisis response program, ANCHOR, to make it 24/7 city-wide. The Ottawa police are currently asking the Ottawa Police Service Board to approve the police spending $30 million dollars to equip all OPS officers with body-worn cameras (BWCs). And the Board will no doubt approve the purchase despite the OPS providing no valid evidence that BWCs will improve police accountability as the OPS claims. Given there’s ample evidence that a 24/7, city-wide mental health crisis response system improves safety for all, Ottawa city council could use the $30 million to expand ANCHOR to a 24/7, city-wide program for two years instead of on body cameras.

A public awareness campaign targeting violence against riders

This would be the easiest to implement by simply adding a focus on riders to OC Transpo’s existing campaign targeting violence against employees.

A single, unified, multidisciplinary street outreach team operating at scale

As Ottawa’s street outreach services are spread across various services, the City could convene members of those services to explore modeling Toronto’s single, unified, multidisciplinary street outreach team operating at scale and run by a single agency (LOFT Community Services in Toronto).

Evaluation

The City will have to evaluate the impact of any initiatives on actual and perceived safety. Actual safety can be measured by reductions in offences against riders and employees and reductions in safety complaints. Changes in rider perception of safety can be measured via surveys. The results must be disaggregated (i.e. women, racialized people, 2SLGBTQ+, people with disabilities, etc.)

To address the evaluation challenges outlined at the beginning on this post, Ottawa can consider: 

  • Randomized controlled trials – For example, implementing an initiative in some transit stations but not others (yet) then comparing outcomes between “treated” and “control” groups;
  • Staggered rollout (phased implementation) – Instead of launching everything everywhere at once, the city would introduce initiatives at different times or places; and/or
  • Factorial design (when testing multiple initiatives) – If the city is launching several initiatives, they can combine them systematically: Group 1: A only; Group 2: B only; Group 3: A + B; Group 4: neither (control). This helps estimate individual effects (of A or B separately),  and interaction effects (of A+B together).

If City’s are designing a bundle of initiatives (like transit safety measures), the biggest mistake is launching everything at once citywide. Instead, they should phase where and when they rollout, keep some areas unchanged to use as comparative baselines (even if temporary), track granular data (location, time, intensity) and predefine what success looks like for each initiative.

Even modest design choices here can make a huge difference in what cities can prove later.

One thing I hope this post demonstrates is that transformative justice community safety initiatives are harder to implement than carceral ones because, unlike the carceral ones, TJ solutions must be evidence-based and rigorously evaluated.

Categories
Transformative justice

No transformative justice. No peace.

Regarding safety in Ottawa where I live, whether it’s speeding on neighbourhood streets, violent incidents on the O-Train, Ottawa’s light rail system, or crises connected to addiction and homelessness, the response from political and police leadership is strikingly predictable. They say we need more police: more patrols, more enforcement, more uniforms in public spaces. Implicit in this argument is a troubling idea, that residents will not be safe until there is effectively a cop on every corner.

But the evidence tells a very different story. More police doesn’t equal safety. In fact, it often produces the opposite result: more harm, more fear, and deeper inequities, especially for Black and Middle Eastern communities who already experience disproportionate police use of force. If Ottawa is serious about public safety, it must move beyond reactive, police-first thinking and invest in transformative justice and non-police community safety solutions.

The Ottawa Police Service (OPS), like police services across North America, frequently frames safety as a question of capacity: if only there were more officers, more tools, and more authority, then harm could be prevented. This logic suggests that danger is best addressed through enforcement and punishment.

Yet decades of research and lived experience show that increased police presence leads to increased police contact, and that contact is not evenly distributed. More officers on the streets inevitably means more stops, more searches, more arrests, and more uses of force. In Ottawa, Black and Middle Eastern residents bear the brunt of this expansion. 

Instead of asking “How do we respond to harm?”, transformative justice asks, “How do we prevent harm by addressing its root causes?” And instead of relying on institutions that often reproduce violence, like the police, it centers community-based solutions that build collective care, accountability, and resilience.

Speeding

Take the issue of speeding. Speeding is a real safety issue in Ottawa. It endangers pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers, and it disproportionately affects seniors, children, and people with disabilities. The default response, however, is enforcement, ticketing drivers through police patrols or automated speed cameras.

Even Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs has acknowledged the limits of the police approach. Following the province of Ontario’s decision to eliminate speed cameras in November 2025, Stubbs admitted that OPS will not be able to deploy officers to every location where cameras once existed. This admission unintentionally reveals a deeper truth: policing has never been a scalable or sustainable solution to traffic safety.

Communities must look beyond police enforcement to design streets that are safe by default. Non-police solutions to speeding include:

  • Traffic calming infrastructure, such as speed humps, raised crosswalks, curb extensions, and narrowed lanes, which physically slow vehicles without relying on punishment.
  • Street redesigns that prioritize people over cars, including protected bike lanes, pedestrian-first intersections, and reduced speed limits paired with road designs that make speeding difficult.
  • Community-led safety programs, where residents work with city planners—not police—to identify dangerous areas and co-design solutions.
  • Public education campaigns rooted in harm prevention rather than fear or fines, emphasizing shared responsibility and community well-being.

These approaches are proven to reduce speeds and collisions while avoiding the racialized impacts of traffic enforcement.

Violent attacks on the O-Train: policing the symptom, not the cause

Violent incidents on Ottawa’s O-Train over the last year understandably generate fear and anger. Calls quickly follow for more police officers on platforms, in stations, or even in every train car. But saturating the transit system with police does not address why people are vulnerable to attack in the first place, nor does it reliably deter harm.

Putting cops on every O-Train car would be enormously expensive, logistically unrealistic, and likely to increase negative interactions with racialized riders, youth, and people in crisis. It risks turning public transit into another heavily policed space rather than a shared public good.

Non-police safety solutions for transit must focus on prevention, deterrence, and care, including:

  • Improved station and vehicle design, such as better lighting, clear sightlines, emergency call buttons, and staffed help points.
  • Transit ambassadors or safety workers—trained, unarmed staff whose role is de-escalation, assistance, and presence, not enforcement.
  • Increased service frequency, reducing overcrowding and long waits that can heighten stress and conflict.
  • Community-based crisis response teams that can be dispatched quickly to support someone in distress without resorting to police intervention.
  • Supportive services near transit hubs, ensuring people who are unhoused or in crisis are connected to help rather than pushed from one space to another.

Safety on the O-Train is not just about stopping attackers; it is about making people less isolated, less desperate, and more supported.

Addiction and homelessness: policing is not care

Perhaps nowhere is the failure of police-led safety more apparent than in responses to addiction and homelessness. Police are routinely called to handle overdoses, mental health crises, encampments, and public disorder, tasks they are neither trained nor equipped to address effectively.

In the short term, non-police solutions are urgently needed, including:

  • Mobile crisis response teams made up of health workers, peer support workers, and social workers who can respond without criminalization.
  • 24/7 safe consumption and overdose prevention services, reducing deaths and connecting people to care.
  • Low-barrier shelters and warming spaces, so people are not forced to choose between safety and dignity.
  • Peer-led outreach, which builds trust far more effectively than uniformed enforcement.

Long-term solutions require structural change:

  • Permanent supportive housing with on-site services.
  • Accessible, publicly funded addiction treatment and mental health care, without long waitlists.
  • Income supports and living wages, addressing the economic roots of homelessness.
  • Community accountability models, where harm is addressed through support, restitution, and healing rather than punishment.

Police involvement in these issues often escalates situations, increases trauma, and cycles people through the criminal justice system, at enormous human and financial cost.

Choosing transformation over fear

Ottawa stands at a crossroads. One path leads to more police, larger budgets, and deeper inequities, while leaving the root causes of harm untouched. The other path embraces transformative justice: investing in housing, health care, safe infrastructure, and community-led safety.

True safety is not the absence of visible disorder enforced by police. It is the presence of care, stability, and connection. It is streets designed so people are not killed by speeding cars. It is transit systems where all riders feel safe. It is a city where addiction and homelessness are met with compassion and resources, not handcuffs.

We do not need a cop on every corner. We need communities empowered to keep one another safe, without fear, without violence, and without leaving anyone behind.

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UNPFPAD

Input to the 5th meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent

The 5th meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent will take place April 14-17 at a still to be decided location. This post is the 613-819 Black Hub’s response to the Forum’s call for inputs.

613-819 Black Hub’s input

In May 2023, Canada announced its bid for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. The 613-819 Black Hub’s input to the 5th Permanent Forum on People of African Descent presents evidence of action, or inaction, suggesting that Canada should not be granted a Human Rights Council seat until it works with Canadian provinces to make substantive progress on these issues.

Government of Canada

Government back tracks on initiatives targeting Black Canadians – The Government of Canada’s Budget 2025 doesn’t mention Black Canadians.

Government ignores human rights– The Government of Canada’s May 2025 Speech from the Throne, which outlines government priorities and was read by King Charles, doesn’t mention human rights or diversity, equity and inclusion or Canada’s Black Justice Strategy which contains comprehensive recommendations, addressing justice, child welfare, immigration and education and aims to transform Canada’s criminal justice system “from one that punishes the poorest and most marginalized members of our society, and that carries a history of racism and oppression, to one that is fair and equitable and free from discrimination; in other words, a justice system that is truly just.”

Cutting immigration, and the foreign aid– the government’s cuts to immigration, and the foreign aid that helps reduce it, will disproportionately impact Black people in Canada, especially migrant workers.

Housing: focusing on increasing supply not preserving existing affordable housing – Black Canadians are disproportionately impacted by the lack of affordable housing. Budget 2025 says the government will save $2.4 billion over four years by halving spending on housing programs over the next four years and prioritizing programming focussed on housing supply via the new Build Canada Homes program. This ignores the far larger issue of the loss of existing affordable housing.

Reducing the federal public service but not its anti-Black racism – While Budget 2025 announced a reduction of about 40,000 federal public service (FPS) positions by the end of 2028-2029, it said nothing about addressing the systemic anti-Black racism in the FPS highlighted in several recent reports on the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Privy Council, Global Affairs Canada and Black FPS executives.

Government of Ontario

Ontario Public Service – Unlike the current federal government, the Government of Ontario is directly addressing issues faced by Black Ontarians – including inside the Ontario Public Service. The Ontario government created the Black Equity Branch in 2022 to lead research, training, and development of policies and programs focused on the elimination of anti-Black racism in the Ontario Public Service. The success of the Branch will require rigorous evaluation.

 Education – As of June 2025, the Ontario government had taken over five Ontario school boards, including the biggest in Toronto and Ottawa, the Toronto District School Board and the Ottawa Carleton District School Board, and replaced all the democratically elected trustees with appointed supervisors – none of whom are Black or have said anything about how they will address systemic anti-Black racism.

Human rights – The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario receives claims of discrimination and harassment under the Ontario Human Rights Code, including claims of anti-Black racism. The Tribunal offers a way for people to seek legal justice without the expense of hiring a lawyer. However, the Tribunal is so backlogged that it can take years to get a hearing. Like at the federal level, the Government of Ontario must be pressured to properly resource the Tribunal to allow for timely resolution of complaints.

Child welfare – Black children remain over represented in Ontario’s child welfare system.

City of Ottawa

Ottawa Police Service – The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) continues to receive multi-million-dollar annual budget increases despite their own data showing they continue to disproportionately use force on, and traffic stop, Black Ottawa residents.

City budget doesn’t mention Black people – None of the City of Ottawa 2026 budget documents we reviewed mentioned Black people.

City of Toronto

Confronting Anti-Black Racism Advisory Committee – At its February 7 and 8, 2023 meeting, Toronto city council re-established the Confronting Anti-Black Racism Advisory Committee. Like all advisory committees, this one must continue to be scrutinized to ensure it’s helping lead – not block – fundamental change.

Toronto Police Service (TPS) – The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) released its report From Impact to Action: Final report into anti-Black racism by the Toronto Police Service in December 2023. The report found that Black people were subjected to systemic racial discrimination, racial profiling, and anti-Black racism.

Quebec

Government of Quebec’s continued refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism – On September 2, 2025, the media reported that the Quebec government has refused federal funding to combat systemic racism in the justice system, saying it does not agree with the program’s approach.”

Cross jurisdictional issues

Judicial racial bias – Discussions on the over representation of Black people in Canada’s criminal justice system, including prisons, rarely mention judges. Yet, there are several systemic issues which contribute to judicial racial bias. The first is the deeply held belief in the legal profession in the impartiality of judges, even regarding cases involving race, despite most judges being white. Second, is judges’ resistance to accept effective anti-racism training as they see such training as indoctrination by outside forces. Third, there’s no race-based data on judges’ rulings. Finally, unlike lawyers, judges aren’t bound by their professional rules of conduct to actively perform conflict checks to avoid presiding over trials where conflicts may exist with the parties involved.

Anti DEI backlash – Much of the current backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion is against performative, ineffective DEI. Peter Sloly, the only Black police chief in Canada’s capital Ottawa, faced massive resistance to DEI reforms he implemented in the Ottawa Police Service.

War on Hate diverts resources from addressing systemic anti-Black racism – In 2016, the United Way of Eastern Ontario launched the United for All initiative billed as “a coalition of organizations, community leaders, and people with lived experience committed to overcoming hate in East Ontario.” In September 2024, the Government of Canada launched Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate. Data continues to show that these initiatives are having no impact on addressing anti-Black hate – especially state-sponsored hate like police disproportionate use of force against Black people. What the initiatives are doing is helping justify further increases to police budgets for hate crime units.

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Copaganda Police

Copaganda helps fuel perpetual police budget increases

One of the main reasons city councils throughout the US and Canada approve big police budget increases every year is copaganda. According to Wikipedia, copaganda is “propaganda intended to shape public opinion about police or counter criticism of police and anti-police sentiment.” But that describes the intent of only one main source of copaganda: the police. The authors of other sources, including the mainstream media, TV shows, movies and books don’t, for the most part, intend to shape public opinion about the cops.

The mainstream media reinforces copaganda by uncritically reporting police press releases like stories about Ottawa police launching a body camera pilot that didn’t include any critical voices citing all the studies showing body cameras don’t reduce police violence.

Cop pop culture products aren’t explicitly meant to influence public opinion, they’re meant to entertain and make money. Whether they make people like cops more is debatable. What isn’t is that they cement racial attitudes, normalize bad police behavior and impede changes to policing in real life, as revealed by a report cited in a June 2020 National Public Radio story. Color of Change, which advocates for racial justice, teamed up with the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center on the study which looked at 26 cop shows and more than 350 episodes, across the 2020 season. It found that, with few exceptions, the shows rarely depicted how disproportionately Black people are targeted by police or how bias is baked into this system. Also, over and over again, the good guy – the police officer, the district attorney – was doing bad things. And it was being endorsed.

Wikipedia quotes The Daily Dot’s Brenden Gallagher saying, “The media has been regurgitating police PR since the days of Andy Griffith and now in the era of Brooklyn 99, it is just being used more often and more effectively.” The Andy Griffith Show was an American sitcom TV series that aired on CBS from 1960 to 1968. It starred Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor, the widowed sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, a fictional community of roughly 2,000–5,000 people. Brooklyn 99 is an American police sitcom television series that aired from 2013, to 2021 and starred Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg.

“Aaron Rahsaan Thomas comments on the history of copaganda in American television: “The past 60 years have seen shows like Dragnet (1951–1959), The Untouchables (1959–1963), and Adam 12 (1968–1975) establish a formula where, within an hour of story, good law men, also known as square-jawed white cops, defeat bad guys, often known as poor people of color.” Subsequent shows such as Hawaii Five-O (1968–1980) and Kojak (1973–1978) solidified this narrative, along with Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), Miami Vice (1984–1989), and Cagney & Lacey (1982–1989), which were “for the most part, told from the point of view of white cops occasionally interacting with people of color who were, at best, one-dimensional criminals, colleagues, bosses, sidekicks, and best friends. Even when blackness was not equated with criminality, it was often supplemented by an inhuman lack of depth or presence.” 

In my post Why white people can’t wait for the zombie apocalypse, I talked about how the main character of the massively popular series, The Walking Dead, was Rick Grimes, a sheriff from a small Georgia town who didn’t seem to have a racist bone in his body – he even hooked up with the show’s bad ass Black female character!

Detective novels (which I, a police abolitionist, ironically read for escape) are rich sources of copaganda. James Patterson’s book covers declare him the world’s bestselling author. Patterson created characters like serial-killer hunting detective Alex Cross. This passage from Patterson’s 2020 novel Blindside is a classic example of copaganda. It’s narrated by NYPD Detective Michael Bennett after he has just shot and killed a young Black man who pulled a gun on him while mugging him:

“All I knew at the moment was that I couldn’t leave the scene. I just wanted to sit here with my thoughts. Silently I prayed, Dear God, have mercy on this young man’s soul. I thought about calling my grandfather, Seamus. Then I heard someone shout, “He did it.” It didn’t register immediately. Then someone else said it. I looked up and over my shoulder to see a small group of people facing me. A heavyset African American man of about thirty-five pointed at me and shouted, “That cop shot RJ for no reason. He murdered him.” I let him talk. It never did any good to speak up. People had to vent. This neighborhood had fought to shed its reputation from the 1980s. Crime, especially homicides, was down. Cops could only do so much. Neighborhoods and the people in them had to decide to change. And this one had. I could understand some misplaced anger over a shooting. The vast majority of cops try to do the right thing. That’s why they get into the business. A few go overboard. And like anything else, most groups are judged by the actions of a few. It’s been like that since the dawn of time. I recognized that prejudgment was contributing to this crowd’s growing fury. They were pissed off. Right now they were pissed off at me. I just took it. My heart fluttered and my hands shook.”

In addition to trying to make the cops look good, copaganda also aims to make cops’ critiques look bad. To that end, just after this scene, Patterson introduces an Al Sharpton-like character called Reverend Caldwell who the pro-police characters say only advocates for people who have been harmed by police…because he gets a cut of their settlements. (Like so often in real life, they provide no evidence of this.)

The earliest copaganda I remember watching is Get Smart, a comedy about a bumbling, James Bond-like character named Maxwell Smart. Smart worked for CONTROL, a secret US government counterintelligence agency based in Washington, D.C., that battled KAOS, an evil international organization. (This foreshadowed North American police forces referring to themselves as the Thin Blue Line between the “chaos” of violent crime and criminals and all the “good” people who obey the law.)

Sesame Street had several police characters, including Officer Krupky, a Muppet cop who appeared on the show during the 1970s and Kermit the Frog appearing as Detective Amphibowicz in NYPD Green, a Muppet parody of the TV show NYPD Blue.

Westerns were also an early form of copaganda with most Sheriffs being portrayed as white, male guardians of good. (Although, some also glorified bad guys like Jesse James.) 

The Simpsons has Chief Clancy Wiggum, chief of police in the show’s setting of Springfield. Although Wiggum is portrayed as gluttonous, irresponsible, immature and often too lazy, cowardly, and corrupt to bother fighting crime, his character isn’t a critique of the institution of policing as Wiggum has two more responsible subordinate officers, Eddie and Lou.

In 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, audiences in the US and elsewhere demanded increased attention to how police were portrayed in crime shows and other media. This resulted in the cancellation of some programs such as the reality TV show Cops and A&E‘s Live PD.

In my post Why Afrikan Canadians should become data warriors, I wrote about how the police create their own copaganda using misleading statistics like the Crime Severity Index and the police to population (cop-to-pop) ratio that support the myths that violent crime is rising and that having more police per 1000 people in the population increases safety (neither is true).

Ottawa’s police chief adds to the virtually non-stop flood of copaganda by regularly ending his verbal reports to the monthly meetings of the Ottawa Police Service Board with feel good stories about Ottawa police officers helping citizens in need. Sometimes he reads grateful citizens’ own letters. However, the Chief never says whether the happy citizens’ are white, Black or anything else. Evidence suggests they’re likely the former.
At a time when so many Ottawa residents are struggling to make ends meet, Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe wants to give the police their biggest budget increase in 15 years. Despite all the evidence proving that investing more in police doesn’t increase safety, copaganda will help ensure that the Ottawa Police Service Board and Ottawa city council will vote to give the police every dollar they ask for – before they head home to unwind with an episode of Law and Order or Blue Bloods.

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Human rights Minority Report

Minority Report #2: Carney sidelines human rights in first 120 days

The biggest takeaway from the first 120 days of Mark Carney’s Liberal government is the almost complete absence of any concrete mention of human rights. As I said in my post Minority Report #1, the Speech from the Throne, which outlines the government’s priorities, doesn’t explicitly mention human rights. It simply says, “The Government will always protect the rights and freedoms that the Charter guarantees for every Canadian.” The government’s priorities, as stated in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s mandate letter, are:

  1. Establishing a new economic and security relationship with the United States and strengthening collaboration with reliable trading partners and allies.
  2. Building one Canadian economy by removing barriers to interprovincial trade and expediting nation-building projects.
  3. Bringing down costs for Canadians and helping them get ahead.
  4. Making housing more affordable by unleashing public-private cooperation and catalysing a modern housing industry.
  5. Protecting Canadian sovereignty and keeping Canadians safe by strengthening our Armed Forces, securing borders, and reinforcing law enforcement.
  6. Attracting the best global talent while returning immigration rates to sustainable levels.
  7. Spending less on government operations so that Canadians can invest more in people and businesses.

This is in stark contrast to the Trudeau government that explicitly mentioned human rights in the 2019 and 2021 Throne speeches and, in May 2023, announced Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nation Human Rights Council for the 2028-2030 term.

This omission supports the argument that Canada faces a human rights credibility gap due to its domestic human rights record. That argument was advanced in the July 30, 2025 Policy Options article Canada’s foreign policy credibility begins at home. For the article, the four authors, all graduate students at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, interviewed dozens of officials and civil society leaders. They found, “Canada’s human rights record looks strong on paper, but the reality is more complicated. We have ratified numerous international human rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. But those commitments rarely make it into enforceable domestic law. Canada’s dualist legal system means international treaties require domestic laws to be enacted to give the treaties legal force at home. Without that, they remain aspirational.”

The authors detail issues with Canada’s domestic human rights system including lack of transparency in human rights reporting, data accessibility and weak enforcement. They said, “Interviewees consistently called for stronger accountability mechanisms. Some proposed legislation to mandate follow-up on UN recommendations or to establish an independent co-ordinating body with real authority.” They ended by saying, “Human rights can’t remain a bureaucratic side project buried in intergovernmental committees. Federal leaders must set clear expectations for provinces and territories, give oversight bodies true power and — most importantly — show Canadians and the world that they are willing to be held accountable.”

It would also be a good idea to not pass laws like Bill C5 which Ecojustice says, “erodes democratic principles, runs roughshod over Indigenous rights, shuts Canadians out of decisions that could affect them, and puts the environment at risk.” One of the most controversial parts of Bill C5 is the powers it gives the government to fast track projects it determines are of “national interest.”

The Assembly of First Nations held national discussions on Bill C5 ten days before it became law. “During the discussion, Chiefs raised strong concerns over the rushed legislative process, lack of meaningful consultation, narrowly defined national interest that excludes First Nations priorities and perspectives…and the broader implications for rights and jurisdiction.” The meeting also featured a First Nations political panel featuring B.C. Regional Chief Terry Teegee; the Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; and former National Chief Ovide Mercredi. “Speakers emphasized that Bill C-5 represents a significant step backward in the Crown–First Nations relationship and questioned the federal rationale to once again sidestep their obligations to First Nations rights holders. They noted that the concept of “national interest” must include the rights of First Nations as original stewards of the land. Speakers stressed that the Bill stands in contrast to what First Nations have long advocated for, and conflicts with Canada’s own laws, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.”

So Carney is doing things which Indigenous people see as directly attacking their human rights – and saying absolutely nothing about the human rights of Black Canadians. This is also in stark contrast to Justin Trudeau who was the first Prime Minister to acknowledge the existence of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada and whose government formally recognized the UN Decade for People of African Descent. The Trudeau Liberals also committed to including Black folks as a distinct group under the federal Employment Equity Act and launched Canada’s Black Justice Strategy.

Luckily, history has shown that fundamental change for Black folks has always come from Black folks’ resistance. So some Black folks aren’t waiting for Mark Carney to show he cares about Black Canadians – they’re taking action now. One tool of resistance available to Black folks (and all folks) is filing human rights complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its provincial counterparts like the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Such complaints are potentially powerful as the Commission/Tribunal has the power to order the target of the complaint to respond – and the person filing the complaint doesn’t have to pay anything, including legal fees as no lawyer is required. The problem is that it can take years to get a result due to huge backlogs at the Commission/tribunals. If Carney really cares about human rights he’ll provide adequate funding to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to allow them to deal with complaints in a timely manner.

According to the office of my Member of Parliament, Liberal Anita Vandenbeld, Carney’s government still has aspirations of a UN Human Rights Council seat and is maintaining Canada’s bid. Canada also said it intends to recognize the State of Palestine at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025, with some conditions, which would be a huge step in supporting the human rights of the Palestinian people. However, Canada must ensure things are right in its own human rights house before seeking a leadership role on the international stage.

Categories
Common enemy Framing

Breaking the frame: resisting the forces telling us what to think about

One of things that stuck with me from my Carleton University masters of journalism was a teacher saying “journalism doesn’t tell us what to think – but it tells us what to think about.” 

That’s called framing and it’s a key tool powerful groups use to sideline “undesirable” topics.

One of the most powerful forms of framing is the “common enemy” method which involves rallying people to fight a common enemy, while sidelining almost every other issue while doing so. For example, Black people were drafted to fight for “freedom” in international conflicts like World Wars I and II or the Vietnam War, and asked to put their concerns about the racism they faced at home aside “for the greater good”. This is also very common in popular culture, especially apocalyptic TVs shows and movies, where people are united in fighting off threats like zombies and no one raises uncomfortable topics like racism.

We’re seeing this now as the Government of Canada rallies Canadians to fight the attacks by US President Donald Trump, resulting in the government adopting the following priorities, which are an example of framing:

  1. Strengthening Canada’s economic and security relationship with the United States and our global allies
  2. Building a unified Canadian economy by removing inter-provincial trade barriers and advancing nation-building infrastructure
  3. Addressing cost-of-living concerns and helping Canadians get ahead
  4. Making housing more affordable through public-private innovation and skilled trade development
  5. Reinforcing national sovereignty and safety through investments in the military, border security, and law enforcement
  6. Attracting top global talent while ensuring sustainable immigration levels
  7. Reducing government operational spending to unlock greater investment in people, communities, and a stronger G7-leading economy

I recently attended a meeting hosted by the Network for the Advancement of Black Communities focussed on the Government of Canada’s 2025 budget. The aim was to discuss doing a joint submission to the government citing the priorities of Canada’s Black communities. We were asked to provide feedback that aligned with the government’s stated priorities, however, the feedback we provided challenged those priorities. Primarily, we challenged the absence of any mention of human rights or closing corporate tax loopholes. We challenged the frame.

Human rights aren’t optional. They’re legally protected at every level, giving Canada legal obligations to fulfill them. So, for example, adding Black Canadians as a distinct group under the federal Employment Equity Act, as the Trudeau Liberals committed to doing in December 2023, isn’t just a nice thing to do. It supports Canada’s legal obligation under the Canadian Human Rights Act to prevent race-based discrimination in employment. Similarly, implementing Canada’s Black Justice Strategy supports Canada’s international and national legal human rights obligations in areas such as immigration, housing and justice.

The lack of any mention of closing corporate tax loopholes among the government’s priorities is a decades old example of framing. Pro-business interests have successfully managed to steer the debate about government finances in one primary direction: reducing government spending while minimizing any mention of closing corporate tax loopholes or raising corporate taxes. This is despite the fact that, according to the Centre for Policy Alternatives’ 2019 pamphlet Fair and Progressive Taxation, “Canada’s tax system is…riddled with expensive loopholes that worsen inequalities. We lose an estimated $47 billion annually to tax evasion, while Canadian companies have nearly $300 billion hiding in known tax havens.”

Canadians for Tax Fairness’ 2021 Corporations pay your fair share! states, “The PBO [Parliamentary Budget Office] estimates that every percentage increase in the general corporate tax rate increases [government] revenues by $1.6 billion, so restoring Canada’s federal rate from 15% to 20% would generate about $8 billion annually.”

But instead of raising taxes on corporations and wealthy Canadians, Prime Minister Mark Carey is doing the opposite. In March 2025, Carney announced he would cancel a proposed capital gains tax increase. According to a March 2025 CBC article, “The decision to axe the increase follows former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to defer it until New Year’s Day 2026. The increase to the share of taxable capital gains was first announced in the 2024 federal budget.  A capital gain is the difference between the cost of an asset — such as an investment property, a stock or a mutual fund — and its sale price. Right now, only half of capital gains are taxable. Those capital gains are added to a person’s income and are taxed at their marginal income tax rate. Had the changes gone through, individuals with annual capital gains over $250,000 would have had two-thirds of those gains taxed. Two-thirds of all capital gains earned by corporations and trusts would also have been taxed.”

This should be an important topic of discussion but it’s not because it’s been framed out of the debate.

Canadian Chamber of Commerce policy chief Matthew Holmes called on Carney to make the business of government business and act on issues such as regulatory reform and trade diversification. Based on the government’s stated priorities, Carney seems to have given Holmes what he wanted. 

In a May 2025 Financial Post article titled ‘CEO Carney’ to run Canada like a business, Terence Corcoron said, “The image of Prime Minister Carney as chief executive of the national economy was also fostered a few days ago by New Brunswick Liberal MP Wayne Long [who] said that the federal government under Carney will be run more like a business than it was under Justin Trudeau.” 

But the government is very different from business in one key way: it can raise money through taxation. So if Carney keeps trying to pay for things by cutting government but not raising taxes on wealthy corporations and individuals that will really show what his priorities are.

Categories
Class Martin Luther King The Poor People's Campaign

The Poor People’s Campaign 2025

According to Wikipedia, “The Poor People’s Campaign, or Poor People’s March on Washington, was a 1968 effort to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States. It was organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King’s assassination in April 1968. The campaign demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp [called Resurrection City] on the Washington Mall [where Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech in August 1963], where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968. The Poor People’s Campaign was motivated by a desire for economic justice: the idea that all people should have what they need to live. King and the SCLC shifted their focus to these issues after observing that gains in civil rights had not improved the material conditions of life for many African Americans. The Poor People’s Campaign was a multiracial effort—including African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans—aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race.

According to political historians such as Barbara Cruikshank, “the poor” did not particularly conceive of themselves as a unified group until [US] President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty (declared in 1964) identified them as such. Figures from the 1960 census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Commerce Department, and the Federal Reserve estimated anywhere from 40 to 60 million Americans—or 22 to 33 percent—lived below the poverty line. At the same time, the nature of poverty itself was changing as America’s population increasingly lived in cities, not farms (and could not grow its own food). 

By 1968, the War on Poverty seemed like a failure, neglected by a Johnson administration (and Congress) that wanted to focus on the Vietnam War and increasingly saw anti-poverty programs as primarily helping African Americans. The Poor People’s Campaign sought to address poverty through income and housing. The campaign would help the poor by dramatizing their needs, uniting all races under the commonality of hardship and presenting a plan to start to a solution. Under the “economic bill of rights,” the Poor People’s Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with a $30 billion anti-poverty package that included, among other demands, a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure and more low-income housing. The Poor People’s Campaign was part of the second phase of the civil rights movement. [Martin Luther] King said, “We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the [Vietnam] war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty”.

King wanted to bring poor people to Washington, D.C., forcing politicians to see them and think about their needs: “We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, ‘We are here; we are poor; we don’t have any money; you have made us this way … and we’ve come to stay until you do something about it.”

The Poor People’s Campaign had complex origins. King considered bringing poor people to the nation’s capital since at least October 1966, when welfare rights activists held a one-day march on the Mall. In May 1967 during a SCLC retreat in Frogmore, South Carolina, King told his aides that the SCLC would have to raise nonviolence to a new level to pressure Congress into passing an Economic Bill of Rights for the nation’s poor. The SCLC resolved to expand its civil rights struggle to include demands for economic justice and to challenge the Vietnam War. In his concluding address to the conference, King announced a shift from “reform” to “revolution” and stated: “We have moved from the era of civil rights to an era of human rights.”

The March on Washington where Dr. King gave his I Have a Dream speech was August 28, 1963. The SCLC announced the Poor People’s Campaign December 4, 1967. King was murdered exactly four months later on April 4, 1968…

The Wikipedia entry continues, “The [Poor People’s] campaign did produce some changes, however subtle [including] more money for free and reduced lunches for school children and Head Start programs in Mississippi and Alabama. The USDA [US Department of Agriculture] released surplus commodities to the nation’s one-thousand poorest counties, food stamps were expanded, and some federal welfare guidelines were streamlined.”, but, “An economic bill of rights was never passed…”

At the beginning of this year I decided to follow in Dr. King’s footsteps by shifting the focus of the group I head, the 613-819 Black Hub, from race to class. Like Dr. King, the purpose is to demand economic and human rights for low-income Canadians of diverse backgrounds. The 2024 report of the National Advisory Council on Poverty said 3.8 million Canadians, or about ten per cent, were living below the poverty line in 2022, and there’s probably more now.

Also like Dr. King, I made the decision to focus on poverty more than race at a time of great push back against groups demanding equity. In the ‘60s that included all the groups involved in The Poor People’s Campaign – African, European, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans. In Canada today, groups advocating for equity include African Canadians, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, women and members of the LGBTQ2S+ communities.

What’s new today are the factors driving the backlash against equity.

There was no internet in the ‘60s, dominated by a few companies making massive profits from stoking division among people – regardless of whether the division is based on fact or misinformation. Also, in King’s time, men, as a group generally, weren’t struggling as people like Richard Reeves argues they are today. The popularity of conservative online Canadian influencers like Adam Beattie, known online as Robin Skies, indicates many young men relate to his message that the promise of a secure middle-class existence had been undone by Liberal policies aimed primarily at older generations. “[Beattie] has described Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s vision for the country as “f–king glorious”.

Men’s struggles are, of course, made worse by the general economic struggles that have, in recent years, affected more middle class people – like trying to find an affordable home to buy or rent.

Right wing folks like Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate have been very successful at connecting with men by saying they understand their struggles…and suggesting who’s to blame for them. Tate’s popularity with young men has been documented in articles like Freddie Feltham’s 2024 Guardian piece, “I’m Andrew Tate’s audience and I know why he appeals to young men”. According to Feltham, Tate had young men working for him spreading conspiracy theories about masculinity under threat from women. Jordan Peterson’s video on the “destructive nature of DEI” has thousands of views and almost 77% of his followers are reportedly men. As for Trump, look who stormed the US Capitol…

Those on the left must also convince young men that they understand their pain, then identify the real cause: the exploitation-based economic system and those who run it. 

Asking young non-Black men to support our fight against systemic anti-Black racism – when they’re struggling to find work – won’t work. We need to convince them we can relate to their struggles because we’re struggling against the same opponent. And we need to talk about how we can work together to improve all our lives – and the future for our kids.

In doing so, it would be smart to talk about The Poor People’s Campaign – what it accomplished, and what it didn’t – and figure out what it will take – and what we’re willing to do – to succeed. Our lives and our children’s lives literally depend on it.

Categories
Mark Carney Minority Report Parliament

Minority Report #1: the first 30 days

This is the first in a series of posts focussed on the new Liberal minority Parliament. This post focuses on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first 30 days (34 to be exact).

Carney’s election night acceptance speech was gracious, including thanking his opponents for taking part in the democratic process. In his first post-election press conference, May 2, Carney focussed on “affordability, security and safety”, saying he was responding to Canadians saying they “wanted their cost of living reduced and their communities to be safe.” He didn’t specify which Canadians wanted to be safe, and from whom.

He promised he’d announce his new Cabinet May 12 (he did May 13) and said he’d invited King Charles to deliver the Speech from the Throne, outlining his government’s priorities, May 27 (which the King did). During the press conference, Carney said having King Charles read the Throne speech would demonstrate Canada’s sovereignty then struggled to respond when a Quebec journalist asked him how having the King read the Throne Speech demonstrates Canada’s sovereignty. 

Carney said his government would cut taxes for the middle class and keep programs that benefit them, including pharmacare, dental care and child care.

On immigration, Carney said he would cap the total number of temporary workers and international students at less than five per cent of the population by the end of 2027, adding, 

“It’s a sharp drop from the high of 7.3 per cent and this will help ease strains on housing, on public infrastructure and social services.”

On housing, Carney outlined plans to reduce taxes for first-time home buyers and development charges (that cities charge developers to provide infrastructure to new developments), and create a modular and prefabricated housing industry.

To keep “Canadians” “safe” in their communities, Carney promised to add 1000 more RCMP officers and toughen up bail laws for anyone charged with stealing cars, home invasion, human trafficking or smuggling.

And he said he would cap the public service (presumably to reduce government spending but he didn’t say that).

And he mentioned one other priority: Canada’s relationship with the U.S.

The Speech from the Throne – which was written by the government and read by King Charles – included pretty much everything Carney said in his first press conference. However, what was more notable was what it didn’t mention: diversity, equity and inclusion. The only mention of diversity was King Charles saying, “I have always had the greatest admiration for Canada’s unique identity, which is recognized across the world for bravery and sacrifice in defence of national values, and for the diversity and kindness of Canadians.” Equity and inclusion aren’t mentioned once. However, King Charles did say, “The Crown has for so long been a symbol of unity for Canada. It also represents stability and continuity from the past to the present. As it should, it stands proudly as a symbol of Canada today, in all her richness and dynamism.” So, just as the Speech ignores diversity, equity and inclusion, it also ignores the views of the many Canadians who see the Crown as a symbol of violent colonization of their countries of origin.

Consistent with this omission, the Speech also doesn’t explicitly mention human rights. It simply says, “The Government will always protect the rights and freedoms that the Charter guarantees for every Canadian.”

The King also said, “It is with a sense of deep pride and pleasure that my wife and I join you here today, as we witness Canadians coming together in a renewed sense of national pride, unity, and hope.”, which completely ignored the fear that’s driving much of the current “unity”.

In another attempt to put a positive spin on a grim reality, the King said, “The Prime Minister and the President of the United States, for example, have begun defining a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the U.S., rooted in mutual respect…”. Is Trump saying Canada should become the 51st state and calling former Prime Minister Trudeau “governor” how he shows his respect?

The Speech included some good things to address the national housing crisis, including cutting the GST on homes at or under $1 million for first-time home buyers and lowering the GST on homes between $1 million and $1.5 million.  The Government also said it will undertake a series of measures to help double the rate of home building while “creating an entirely new housing industry”. It will do this by introducing measures to deliver affordable homes by creating Build Canada Homes, a “mission-driven organization” that will act to accelerate the development of new affordable housing by investing in the growth of the prefabricated and modular housing industry. The Government says it will provide “significant” financing to “affordable” home builders. It promised to “make the housing market work better”, including by cutting municipal development charges in half for all multi-unit housing (which seems like a pretty blatant intrusion on municipal jurisdiction). The Government says it will “drive supply up to bring housing costs down”. But it said nothing about preserving existing affordable housing despite groups like the Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative producing reports saying this:

“At a national level Canada is losing eleven lower rent affordable homes for every one home added (at considerable subsidy cost) under federal and federal-provincial-territorial programs. The lesson from this analysis is that it is not enough to focus on adding new supply (both market and affordable). It is critical to slow the erosion, and to plug the holes in the bottom of the bucket – a solution that is currently absent in the National Housing Strategy (NHS).”

The Speech also said nothing about addressing the role of real estate investment trusts in creating – and maintaining – the housing crisis. REITs allow corporations to invest in real estate without needing to manage a property, whether residential or commercial. Investors receive the rental income as a dividend. According to Doreen Nicoll’s August 2024 rabble article Long-term care REITs fueling the housing crisis in Canada, 

“REITs own over 20 per cent of the private rental stock in Canada. From 2011 to 2016, a total of 320,000 rental units became unaffordable to tenants with incomes under $30,000 annually. REITs and other financial models incentivize taking affordable units off of the market. That’s part of the reason affordable rental units continue to be lost at a rate 15 times faster than new affordable units are being created.” If the Government really cares about Canadians’ safety, it should put more money into affordable housing and less in policing.

The Throne Speech included only two references to one of the biggest threats to Canadians’ safety: climate change. The Speech was much more focussed on getting energy projects built than on ensuring they didn’t accelerate climate change. The Government committed to creating a new Major Federal Project Office mandated to reduce the time needed to approve a project from five years to two; “all while upholding Canada’s world-leading environmental standards and its constitutional obligations to Indigenous Peoples.” The Government said that by “removing these barriers that have held back our economy, we will unleash a new era of growth that will ensure we don’t just survive ongoing trade wars, but emerge from them stronger than ever. It will enable Canada to become the world’s leading energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy. To build an industrial strategy that will make Canada more globally competitive, while fighting climate change.” How the Government will fight climate change while approving energy projects faster, isn’t clear.

What is clear is how the Government continues to respond to non-existent “crises” dreamt up by Donald Trump, including the false idea that massive amounts of fentanyl are pouring across the Canadian border into the U.S. To address this “crisis”, the Government plans to “introduce legislation to enhance security at Canada’s borders. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies will have new tools to stop the flow of fentanyl and its precursors. The Canada Border Services Agency will be given new powers to examine goods destined for export, to prevent the transport of illegal and stolen products, including cars.” This War on Fentanyl risks having some of the same disastrous impacts on marginalized people as the War on Drugs, which at least was attempting to address a real problem.

Real problems – like crime – need solutions that address their root causes. Instead, the Government has chosen to hire a thousand new RCMP officers and toughen up bail laws for anyone charged with crimes including stealing cars and home invasion. First, hiring more police and imposing stricter bail conditions have both proven ineffective as they don’t address the roots of crime, including poverty. Secondly, the focus on car theft and home invasion shows who the government cares about as poor people don’t have cars to steal or homes to invade. 

The Throne Speech does address another real problem: immigration. The Government says it’s  “dedicated to rebuilding the trust of Canadians in immigration by restoring balance to the system.” What is meant by Canadians’ “trust in immigration” and what evidence the Government has that they’ve lost it, isn’t clear. What is clear is the Government’s promise to cap the total number of temporary foreign workers and international students to less than five percent of Canada’s population by 2027. Carney said this move — promised by then-immigration minister Marc Miller under the previous government — will ease the pressure on housing and social services. This is backed up by evidence. However, federal public servants told the government about these pressures in 2022 – the same year Canada opened its doors to Ukrainians fleeing the war in their country. The federal government said nothing about immigration worsening the housing crisis then despite things like Ottawa – the seat of the federal government – becoming the first Canadian city to declare a housing and homelessness emergency in January 2020. Could this be because the immigrants coming to Canada now are a different color than they were then? That’s the kind of question the few remaining NDP MPs will hopefully ask. They will also, no doubt, push the government to keep its promise to protect child care, pharmacare and dental care – programs the NDP pushed the Trudeau government to implement via the agreement the NDP had to keep the minority liberals in power.

The Throne Speech says the Government will “embark on the largest transformation of its economy since the Second World War…”, aimed at creating a “new economy that serves all Canadians.” This sounds great except that the only means of paying for it that the Government mentions in the Throne Speech is capping the public service. It says nothing about increasing corporate taxes or closing corporate tax loopholes.

Considering some of the corporations that will benefit from the Government’s favourable corporate tax policy are media companies it’s good that the Government has promised to protect CBC/Radio Canada – because we’re going to need journalists willing to bite the hand that feeds them.

The Government has promised a fall budget we can expect to reflect the priorities in the Speech from the Throne. Black Canadians aren’t among those priorities – as Carney’s Cabinet reflects.

Categories
CIPAA Data

Why Afrikan Canadians should become data warriors

Data is one of the most important tools for activists in the fight for basic human rights to be respected. One reason is that data can back up the anecdotal evidence activists and community members have had for years. Like, when the Ottawa police were forced to start collecting race-based traffic stop data in 2013, it showed what Black people in Ottawa had long suspected: the police were disproportionately stopping Black people.

The basic data advocacy steps are:

  1. Identify data gaps (i.e. what data is needed).
  2. Ask the target organization if it has the data.
  3. If they say they don’t have it, ask them to produce it.
  4. If they refuse or delay, take action to force them to collect it.
  5. Ask them to act on the data they collect.
  6. If they refuse or delay, take action to force them to act on it.
  7. Continuously refine data literary skills, including countering misinformation.

The first step to getting good data is identifying which data you have and which you don’t. This can be done by searching organizations’ websites and asking the organizations directly. Gaps can be at the organization or systemic level. For example, regarding housing in Ottawa, at the organizational level, Ottawa’s largest provider of community and affordable rentals, Ottawa Community Housing, doesn’t collect race-based data on who its tenants are while anecdotal evidence indicates they’re largely Black people. Despite this, Ottawa’s 2023 Progress Report on its 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan 2020-2030 doesn’t mention Black people once. At a systemic level, there’s no race-based data on judicial decisions at any court level despite Canadian judges’ role in the disproportionate incarceration of Black people in Canada and the fact that most Canadian judges are white.

For single organizations, you can just ask them if they have the data. Systemic data gaps are harder to fill. The collection of race-based data on judicial decisions, for example, would likely require federal and provincial legislative changes, changes to judicial council policies, and policy directives from judicial and governmental bodies like Justice Canada and provincial attorney generals…which could take years to achieve.

If organizations don’t have the required data, they can be asked to produce it. If they refuse, or delay, action can be taken to force them to collect it. In November 2022, we asked the Boys and Girls Club of Ottawa (BGC Ottawa) what percent of the referrals from the Ottawa police to BGC’s Community Youth Diversion Program were Black. BGC Senior Manager of Community Services Tom Scholberg said BGC didn’t track identity-based data for OPS referrals in their database. In March 2023, Scholberg said BCG could ask their database guy to add a tick box to designate a youth as ACB [African-Canadian Black] in their database, instruct staff to use it, then take a look in a few months. In May 2024, we followed up and Scholberg said BCG had added a tick box for ACB clients to their database related to the diversion program as of January 1, 2024 and that he’d be willing to ask BGC’s database person to create a report. However, when I followed up about getting the report, BGC CEO Adam Joiner got involved and in July 2024 said, “At this point, there is no significant conclusions and/or meaning that we can attribute to the data at this point, because it is so early in our collection of this type of information. We’d be happy to revisit after a year of us collecting this type of information and see if this is information that would have value in sharing broadly. Our goal with data collection is to help inform our programs and services.” I followed up with Joiner at the end of March 2025 but got no reply.

If required, organizations can be forced to collect race-based data. In 2017, the Government of Ontario introduced the Anti-Racism Act and the Education Equity Action Plan, which required schools across the province to collect and publicly report on identity-based data. Ontario ordered all Ontario police services to add race to their use of force reporting starting in January 2020. However, just because an organization is ordered to collect data doesn’t mean it will. The Ottawa Carleton District School Board only started collecting identity based data in the 2019-2020 school year.

Although the Ottawa Police Service began collecting race-based use of force data in January 2020 as mandated, they only released the 2020 data publicly in May 2022. The data showed Black folks being over represented by 4.8 times in use of force reports in 2020, 3.1 times in 2022 but back up to 3.3 times in 2023. Despite Ottawa police leadership saying each time that the force “must do better”, they haven’t set an actual goal to do so. And Ottawa Police Services Board (OPSB) Vice Chair, Ottawa city councillor Marty Carr, provided some insight into why that is.

Carr testified at the inquest into the death of Abdirahman Abdi who died in 2016 following an arrest by Ottawa police. The inquest ended in December 2024. Carr spoke about the OPS’ disproportionate use of force against racialized Ottawa residents and said several times that the Board was concerned that there has been no change in the use of force race data “in the last decade” and that the Board was responding by creating “new key performance indicators”. I asked Carr at the January 2025 OPSB meeting why the Board was creating new KPIs when it already has use of force data showing the OPS continues to use force disproportionately on Black and Middle Eastern residents. In response, Carr said the use of force data aren’t KPIs because the Board hasn’t used them to set targets for the OPS to reduce its disproportionate use of force against Black and Middle Eastern people. She said the data is “just data” and that’s why the Board is creating new KPIs. But the Board doesn’t need to create any new KPIs because the OPS has already done that. They’re listed on page 6 of the Ottawa police’s DRIVE2 Strategy 2023-2027, under Key Performance Indicators, where it lists “Race-based data. Use of Force and traffic stops”. So the Board simply has to require the OPS to follow its own DRIVE2 strategy and set targets to reduce its disproportionate use of force against Black people from 3.3 times more than expected to zero ASAP. 

At the Board’s March 2025 meeting, the Board presented its Strategic Plan Objectives, including KPIs. However, the use of force KPI was far too vague, being, “Proportion of use of force incidents involving Black, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and other racialized individuals.” At that meeting we pushed the Board to set more specific data-based targets for the existing KPIs. They said they would come back with revised KPI information at their April meeting but didn’t. Also, it wasn’t clear whether they meant more specific goals based on existing KPIs or creating new KPIs. Them creating new KPIs would be an example of a standard tool of resistance to change: responding to negative data by saying more data is needed.

Another tool of resistance organizations use is creating their own false or misleading data. In 2019, the Ottawa Police Service hired Carleton University professor Linda Duxbury to evaluate its latest community policing program called Neighborhood Resource Teams. Duxbury had done research on Peel Regional Police’s School Resource Officer program that minimized voices of Black and Indigenous students. When community groups pushed Duxbury to include Black and Indigenous voices in her NRT study, the OPS cancelled the 3-year, $260,000 research project.

The Ottawa Police Service regularly uses misleading statistics like the Crime Severity Index (CSI) and the police to population (cop-to-pop) ratio to support the myth that violent crime is increasing and the only answer is more police. The Crime Severity Index is a complex tool which tracks changes in the severity of police-reported crime by accounting for both the amount of crime reported by police in a given jurisdiction and the relative seriousness of the crimes. The Ottawa police selectively use stats from the CSI to fan fears about increasing crime. For example, the OPS’ 2023 Annual Report says, “the severity of crime in Ottawa increased 5 percent to 58.8 points in 2023.” It also shows that, according to the CSI, “violent” crime in Ottawa increased by 0.1 percent from 2022 to 2023 and “non-violent” crime increased by 7.6 percent in the same time. But couldn’t that mean that some people switched from committing violent to non-violent crime? Also, what is “violent” crime? Statistics Canada’s Understanding and using the Crime Severity Index says “the CSI is not intended to be used in isolation and is not a universal indicator of community safety.” – but the police don’t mention that.

However, the police often say Ottawa has a lower police to population, or cop-to-pop, ratio than many other cities and that makes it less safe. However, there’s no evidence that a higher cop-to-pop ratio leads to more safety. In fact, what is clear from the OPS’ own use of force stats is that more police officers would mean more officers using force disproportionately on Black and Middle Eastern folks.

Black communities must develop expertise in addressing misinformation, including how to file federal Access to Information and provincial Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy requests for government information. They must also learn how to file appeals with the appropriate privacy commissioner if the government organization from which they’re requesting information refuses. When you file an appeal with Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner they assign a mediator who calls you and the freedom of information representative of the organization and helps mediate a deal. 

So, in order to advance systemic change and the respect for human rights, we must push organizations and systems to collect and act on data. To that end, it would be great to have an organization focused on data advocacy for Afrikan Canadians. And perhaps the Canadian Institute for People of Afrikan Descent could play that role.

On August 30, 2024, the Government of Canada announced that a total of $7.25 million would be provided over three years to Caribbean African Canadian Social Services (CAFCAN) to establish the first-ever National Institute for People of African Descent. In February 2025, at the 4th National Black Canadians Summit, CAFCAN executive director Floydeen Charles-Fridal announced that the organization had been renamed the Canadian Institute for People of Afrikan Descent.

CIPAA’s objectives include informing and influencing policy and program development at all levels of government from a Black-centric perspective and conducting applied research, knowledge development, information sharing, stakeholder engagement, and network-building. 

Given these objectives, CIPAA could become a centre for data advocacy for Afrikan Canadians. It could house, and share, existing data, help identify data gaps and push organizations and systems to move to the next level of data development. It could advocate against the unlawful collection and use of data such as carding. It could also provide data literacy resources to empower Afrikan communities to effectively use data and protect themselves against it being used against them.

CAFCAN is currently holding consultations with Afrikan communities to help shape what CIPAA will be. We will continue calling for CIPAA to help Afrikan Canadians become data warriors by becoming a national Afrikan data advocacy centre.

No data. No justice. No peace.

Categories
Housing Police

The thin blue line between housing and policing

At the end of 2024, I decided to shift a chunk of the work I do on policing to housing – and immediately began learning the links between the two.

The first link is the close connections between the Multifaith Housing Initiative (MHI) and the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). MHI’s website says MHI “exists to build affordable housing that helps fix Ottawa’s housing crisis and gets at-risk people into secure, safe homes”. What I couldn’t find on MHI’s site was any mention of MHI being one of two recipients of funds raised through the13th Annual Ottawa Police Gala, held November 2, 2024 in Ottawa. 

Sahada Alolo, MHI’s Director of Community engagement, is the Community Co-Chair of the Ottawa Police Service Community Equity Council and the Co-Secretariat Director of the Guiding Council on Mental Health and Addictions which the Ottawa police created and on which the OPS sits.

Then there’s Herongate, a large rental neighbourhood in Ottawa which is owned by multi-billion-dollar real estate investment firm, Timbercreek Asset Management. Around 800 people — predominantly lower-income, racialized households — have been demovicted and displaced from the neighbourhood since 2016, leading to the emergence of the Herongate Tenant Coalition to fight the evictions and confront Timbercreek. 

Suzanne Valiquet, Timbercreek’s former public relations consultant and overseer of tenant relocation in Herongate, served multiple terms on the Ottawa Police Service Board, including as Chair. According to Andrew Crosby’s 2023 book about Herongate, Resisting Eviction, court documents spotlight her relationship with Ottawa police and Timbercreek. On October 4, 2018, a 911 call was made from Timbercreek’s office requesting police assistance to disperse a tenant rally. Emails written by Valiquet to Timbercreek officials indicate that she received advice directly from the chief of police (Charles Bordeleau at the time) on how to escalate the police response: “At 5:39 pm I called 911. I called a second time (on the advice of the Chief of Police). This way our call went from a priority 2 to priority 1 emergency call. Six police officers arrived around 6:03 pm”. Valiquet further indicated that the police officers advised her to continue to call for assistance if there were future demonstrations, noting that “the more times you call the bigger the file against [them] will grow.”

Ottawa Police Services Board member, Ottawa city councillor Cathy Curry, is also on the Planning and Housing Committee. Decisions about housing policy—such as zoning, development approvals, and funding allocations—are deeply interconnected with the lived realities of over-policed communities. Curry’s dual role raises questions about potential conflicts of interest and whether community voices are adequately represented in these critical discussions.

In November 2024, real estate lawyer Michael Polowin was appointed to the Ottawa Police Service Board, raising more concerns about links between those shaping Ottawa’s housing landscape and those overseeing policing. When individuals with vested interests in real estate development are placed in positions of police oversight, it risks further prioritizing corporate and development interests over community well-being.

The CEO of Ottawa Community Housing, Ottawa’s largest provider of community and affordable rentals in Ottawa, Stéphane Giguère, is on the Board of Crime Prevention Ottawa with Ottawa Police Service Chief Eric Stubbs. Crime Prevention Ottawa says it contributes to crime reduction and enhanced community safety in Ottawa through collaborative, evidence-based crime prevention. On July 12, 2023, Ottawa city council approved the merger of Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO) with the City’s Community Safety and Well-Being office “for a more cohesive, integrated approach by the City to crime prevention.”

Another link between housing and policing is the disproportionate amount of funding spent on both.

In its 2025 budget, the City of Ottawa committed $22.9 million to develop more affordable and supportive housing for residents in greatest need. In the same budget the City gave the Ottawa police budget a $16 million increase, bringing the OPS net operating budget to $388.7 million.

However, while there is ample evidence of the benefits of investing in affordable housing, the same cannot be said for policing. In its 2017 report, Understanding the Benefits of Investments in Affordable Housing, the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis says:

“Investment in affordable housing provides substantial economic benefits at both the local and regional levels (provincial in Canada or state in the U.S.). Investment in affordable housing has the potential to generate new jobs, wages and salaries, economic activity, and government revenue due to the economic activity generated by the direct construction or revitalization itself, the indirect purchase or sale of goods or services upstream or downstream by firms directly involved in construction, and the induced activity that occurs due to the increased wages and salaries that these previous effects generate. Furthermore, at each of these steps, government revenue is generated through taxation, permits or fees required throughout the process.”

However, there’s no evidence supporting the claims of the police and their supporters that investing in policing achieves policing’s main stated goals: preventing and reducing crime.

There is, however, ample evidence that the police negatively impact racialized people all along the pre-school to prison pipeline. From their presence in schools that disproportionately harms racialized students to their disproportionate use of force and traffic stops against racialized residents, the police inflict harm on racialized residents on a daily basis. This harm contributes to the disproportionate involvement of racialized people in the criminal justice system – which can be financially crippling to people already financially marginalized. 

It’s hard to pay your rent…when you have to pay your lawyer.