Penalties needed to stop carding, forum told
Two years ago, Ontario introduced a regulation to try to eliminate carding — the controversial police practice of collecting information from random, racially based stops of citizens.
The problem, according to black activist Desmond Cole, is that it’s written as a regulation, not a law.
“It has no teeth,” said Cole, a Toronto journalist who frequently appears in the Toronto Star. “It wasn’t meant to punish police, so our people still keep getting stopped.”
Indeed, the legislation doesn’t include any sanctions that can be applied to police if they don’t follow the regulation.
Besides, Cole said, we don’t need new legislation to outlaw the practice of carding. Everything we need to stop it is already included in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states Canadians have the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and from being arbitrarily detained.
“Everywhere that we have statistics on carding — whether it’s Hamilton, Peel, Calgary, Halifax — black and Indigenous people are overrepresented,” said Cole.
“This is not an accident.” Cole was one of the featured speakers at Sunday’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination held at the United Steelworkers Centre on Barton Street East.
A standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 people turned out to hear a day-long roster of speakers and musical presentations.
The actual day of the event falls on March 21, which commemorates the 1960 massacre of 69 black people by police during a protest in Sharpeville, South Africa. Thousands had gathered in front of the police station that day to protest the South African rule that required blacks and “coloured people” to carry a pass to move around.
“Nothing has changed since 1960 in Sharpeville,” said Cole. “They continue to follow around black people and keep information about us and where we’re going and what we’re doing.”
Earlier, Six Nations Chief Ava Hill talked about the racism and discrimination faced by Indigenous people at Six Nations.
“We see it with our sports teams when they go out to play hockey or lacrosse, we see it in the stores when we shop,” said Hill.
“We all know racism is alive and well today,” she added.
“Rather than trying to understand us as Indigenous people, many people would rather discriminate against us, ignore us and badmouth us.
Hill spoke about the lingering scars felt by Indigenous people across Canada, from broken promises on treaties to the damage caused by the residential school system.
“We need to turn reconciliation into reconcili-action,” said Hill.
The day included steel drum music by the Hamilton Youth Steel Orchestra as well as a participatory demonstration put on by the McMaster Indigenous Student Community Alliance.
The exercise involved dozens of audience members learning from an Indigenous perspective what has happened over the centuries after the arrival of European settlers.