LIBERALS AND THE BLACK COMMUNITY
From partnership to condescending paternalism.
In the early 1970s, my grandparents immigrated to Canada from Jamaica. They arrived alongside a fresh wave of immigrants from the Caribbean whose skin colour and country of origin were no longer barriers to entry; for that they have the Liberal government under the late Pierre Elliot Trudeau to thank. My grandparents and thousands of others like them were welcomed by a political party and a charismatic leader who believed in a multicultural future for Canada. Whether motivated by tolerance, political strategy, or both, the Liberal Party of Canada earned the loyalty of black voters for multiple generations.
As a lifelong Liberal voter and former volunteer with the Justin Trudeau leadership campaign, it pains me to say the party no longer deserves that loyalty.
The Liberal party was once a champion for diversity not only in policy, but in the formation of its caucus. While the first black member of Parliament, Lincoln Alexander, was a Progressive Conservative, the Liberals would add Caribbean-born heavyweights like Hedy Fry and Jean Augustine to their caucus ranks, and Anne Cools to the Senate. But over the last 15 years, the Liberals have failed to open the door any wider for black MPs, and failed to address the massive economic, justice, health, educational, and employment inequalities affecting Canada’s black communities. More egregiously, in the last year the party has supported policies, rhetoric, and even candidates that have endangered our communities.
Bill C-51, for instance, which the Liberals supported, has serious implications for Canada’s black communities. It authorizes unprecedented surveillance powers by CSIS, allows for sensitive personal information to be shared by government agencies, and has the potential to have legal, legitimate protests such as Black Lives Matter deemed a threat to national security. Mosques, many attended heavily by Nigerian and Somali Canadians, are also now set for greater sur- veillance. Yet, even after Justin Trudeau’s speech at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel denouncing the Conservatives for waging a campaign of fear and intolerance, the Liberal caucus supported C-51, helping pass it into law. Trudeau himself didn’t vote for the bill — not out of principle, but because he never showed up for the vote.
I spoke to a Liberal candidate about the implications for the bill, and the fact that the party he was running to represent supported a bill that had such significant consequences for Canada’s black communities. He pointed out that Liberals fought for amendments to scale back the more controversial aspects of the bill, and that if the Liberals won the election, there would be further amendments. I pressed him on this, pointing out that Liberals were essentially holding our rights hostage. He shrugged his shoulders and mentioned the majority of Canadians supported the bill, as though our rights were subject to polls and not the Charter. I also spoke to a nomination candidate, and asked why, if Liberals were so committed to multiculturalism and fighting stigmatization of Muslim communities, they would throw their support behind such an unconscionable piece of legislation. The answer: “If there’s another terrorist attack before the election, we’re toast.”
As if supporting C- 5 1 wasn’t bad enough, the Liberals openly courted former Toronto police chief Bill Blair and paved the way for his nomination in the Scarborough Southwest riding. This is the same Bill Blair who allowed racial profiling to flourish under his tenure, in the form of “carding” — stopping individuals not suspected of criminal activity, recording their personal in- formation, and storing it in a massive database over which the public has no oversight. Rather than follow instructions from the Toronto Police Services Board to create a new community policy that eliminated carding, Blair procrastinated for over a year before producing a flimsy document that allowed carding to continue, and had no measures to enforce accountability for police misconduct. By the time Bill Blair’s tenure as chief ended, the matter of carding had become a social and political storm. Blair left the carding mess in the lap of his successor, Mark Saunders, whose staunch support for carding is exceeded only by his appalling ineptitude at public relations.
Throughout this mess, both Trudeau and the Liberal party remained silent. The party which once championed a “multinational state,” in Pierre Trudeau’s words, cowed itself into silence and abandoned black communities, all for a shot at earning a single seat in the House of Commons.
Somewhere along t his path of squandered potential, the Liberal party’s increasing distance from black communities transformed our relationship from a partnership to condescending paternalism. The Liberal party and its leaders have hardly bothered to engage black communities outside of the occasional awards ceremony or Black History Month event. And even when they do deign to visit with our communities, it’s to deliver a speech and remind us of favours from nearly a half-century ago; never to sit with an audience, answer questions, and assess our needs. Then there was Trudeau’s recent, pointed references to “certain music” and “communities where fathers are less present” — hoary and incorrect stereotypes with which black communities have been branded for far too long.
I still consider myself a Liberal. I have voted Liberal since the day I received my first voter registration card, and have volunteered for the Liberal party since the first phone call I received from a campaign office. I hope to support the Liberal party again. But I also belong to one of Canada’s many black communities, and we face real crises. We are subjected to police harassment and brutality before being swept into a rapidly expanding prison complex. Our children are subject to school systems that punish more effectively than they educate. Our men and women are subject to a gauntlet of prejudices that hinder access to the workplace, only to navigate workplace exploitation and career ceilings when they do make it through the gates. We are spiritually rich, economically poor, and politically nonexistent. These facts are widely known, and yet the party which opened the borders have continually shut the doors.
This is why I can’t vote Liberal on Oct. 19. And though many people in Canada’s black communities may feel the way that I do, there is still a strain of loyalty and tradition that compels them to vote Liberal. I understand this, because I feel it, too. But there comes a point where we need to admit to ourselves that our support is being taken for granted.
We can’t begin to mend until we force the Liberal party to acknowledge the problem, and that can only happen by withdrawing our support. Without drastic improvements and a genuine effort at rebuilding its relationship with our communities, that support should stay withdrawn. I won’t offer any suggestion as to which other party deserves our votes, but I will say the Liberals need to start showing us why they do.
Trudeau and his party has hardly bothered to engage black communities outside of the occasional awards ceremony or Black History Month event