Meanwhile, Canada makes no progress on inequality
I bet that most Canadians followed political news in the United States more closely in 2016 than we monitored officials in our own country. Donald Trump’s odyssey of hatred and deception played well in Canada, especially because it fed our habit of painting our political reality as divine by comparison.
Canada’s politicians and public officials failed countless times in 2016 to stand against oppression, remove barriers to inequality and uplift people in this country who have been forgotten. I get it — Americans elected Donald Trump. But he and his country can never serve as the standard for our conduct. In our national anthem, we pray that God keeps our land glorious and free, even though it hasn’t been either of those things in recent memory. Things didn’t get much better in 2016.
In January, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government has been racially discriminating against indigenous children who live on reserves. The tribunal ruled that these indigenous children — 163,000 of them — receive significantly less funding for child welfare services than nonindigenous kids do. This shortfall has existed since Confederation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government have ignored the tribunal and its restatements of the ruling for the full calendar year. The government supported a unanimous motion in October to finally fix the funding gap, but no cash has flowed.
Cindy Blackstock, who has been leading the fight for equitable funding for a decade, said of the disparity in March, “it is the only example we know of in the developed world where a country has been placed on trial for its contemporary treatment of a generation of indigenous children, before a body that can make a binding order.”
Silences on anti-black racism were deafening this year. Black people remain the fastest-growing group in Canada’s federal prisons — the black population has increased by 70 per cent since 2005. These staggering realities barely made news in 2016, and it is difficult to find a Canadian politician who commented publicly on their significance.
A 2013 report on the experiences of black federal inmates noted that “the number of incarcerated Black women appears to be rising quickly.” However, this year’s report found a much more Canadian way to describe the trend for black women: “The ethnic diversity within the inmate population is increasing.”
Black Lives Matter Toronto staged one of the most courageous public protests in Toronto’s history, in large part to condemn inaction to the police killing of Andrew Loku last summer. Mayor John Tory did his best to ignore BLMTO and suggested it would be beneath him to meet the group publicly. As he often does when black people demonstrate our resolve, Tory changed his mind in April and promised public meetings with BLMTO and the wider black communities of Toronto. The mayor still hasn’t announced those meetings.
Our political institutions are designed to perpetuate inequality, but every now and again the public forces a concession or knocks down a wall. In the spring, Ontario’s government finally agreed to end the clawback of child support to people on welfare, the overwhelming majority of whom are women.
In May, the federal government introduced legislation to protect trans people under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Among other things, the new law would finally make it illegal to discriminate against trans people at work or deny them employment based on gender identity or gender expression.
Perhaps the most understated bit of relief in 2016 was the late-summer revelation that former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper was leaving politics. Good riddance.
Sadly, his successor, Justin Trudeau, who campaigned on “sunny ways,” spent the year smiling down on us as he continued to imprison people without immigration status, to target Muslims under nightmarish “anti-terror” laws, such as C-51, and, most recently, to approve two new oil pipelines with the baseless claim that he was acting based on “rigorous debate, on science and on evidence.”
While Harper didn’t care if he had political consensus, Trudeau pretends to have it, whether he does or not. Both men share assumptions of corporate power and white settler colonial dominance, which is why economic and social justice in Canada comes slowly, or not at all, or things get even tougher.
Canada remains a country of immense wealth and twisted priorities. I wish the millions who struggle to survive in our country had more to celebrate in 2016. I’d say 2017 can’t possibly be worse, but I’d rather set a much higher bar.