Acknowledge past evils, work for united future

Jason Kenney says racism has no place in Alberta.

We asked the leaders of the two major parties about what Alberta should do to fight racism. NDP Leader Rachel Notley wrote for June 22; This is Premier Jason Kenney’s column:

The recent murder of George Floyd has been a catalyst for a cathartic public debate throughout the United States, across Canada and the entire world. Let us hope it will lead to a real change in hearts, minds and institutions.

We must affirm clearly and with one voice that racism is always and everywhere an unqualified evil. It is a sickness of the soul, a stain on humanity. We must recognize our own sad history of institutional racism in Canada, and that many Albertans continue to experience racial prejudice.

Albertans seek to build a society rooted in the inalienable dignity of the human person, equality of all before the law, and true equality of opportunity. These convictions cannot abide attitudes of racial prejudice that violate human dignity.

We should be grateful that Canadians have built one of the most welcoming, tolerant societies in human history, a society in which people from every corner of the world strive to join. As we approach Canada Day, we should remember those noble souls who abolished slavery in Upper Canada in 1792 as one of the first places in the world to do so, making Canada the North Star for escaped slaves seeking freedom through the Underground Railroad.

And yet the same country later imposed a racist head tax on Chinese migrants, banned Black people from migrating to Canada, interned immigrant families during the World Wars, adopted the “none is too many” policy for Jews fleeing the Shoah, and devastated Indigenous communities through the residential school regime. In that brutally failed experiment, families were destroyed by coercive state power in an effort to deracinate Indigenous children from their families, their languages and their cultures.

That’s the paradox of Canadian history. Such overtly unjust policies are now unthinkable in Canada, yet many of our fellow Albertans still do not enjoy full equality of opportunity, and some experience forms of prejudice. We must listen to and learn from their experiences.

That is why this government has restored the regular meetings between ministers and First Nations chiefs, and made a sincere effort to work for real reconciliation, which respects the long and proud traditions of the First Nations and seeks to make them true partners in prosperity.

In my years serving as Canada’s minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, I heard from thousands of new Canadians about barriers to their full inclusion. Many told me that they had experienced unjust treatment that was neither explicit nor official. Often that meant never getting callbacks on job applications for which they were well qualified. Bias is often encountered in the Byzantine system for recognizing foreign credentials, education and experience. Alberta’s government is determined to knock down these barriers through our Fairness for Newcomers Action Plan, working with employers and professional licensing bodies to remove systemic barriers that block people from achieving their full potential.

We must also acknowledge the overrepresentation of people from minority backgrounds in the criminal justice system, particularly Indigenous Albertans, issues that are being addressed in an ongoing review of the Alberta Police Act. The vast majority of those who serve in our police services are good and honourable people who put their lives on the line to protect us. They deserve our gratitude, not vilification. I know that they support ongoing efforts to ensure the constant improvement and fairness of our justice system. While addressing these issues, we must also focus on the disproportionate number of victims of crime from racial minority backgrounds. They deserve to be protected and to see their victimizers brought to justice.

Racism is real. So too is the enormous progress that we have made as a society.

More needs to be done, while acknowledging that no government program or policy can remove malice from someone’s heart. We must be alert to our personal biases while creating unity in our diversity.

Let us renew the ambition of those early Canadian abolitionists who dreamed of Canada as that North Star of freedom and human dignity, and let us work together, following their example, to make our pluralism a model for the world.