Premier’s words of solidarity ring hollow

When Ottawa resident Abdirahman Abdi died in 2016 after a violent police encounter, the family and local advocates say they bumped up against a system they felt was more about protecting police than about safeguarding communities.

While the officer involved now faces various charges, including manslaughter and is awaiting the conclusion of his trial, the process remains deeply flawed.

This despite wide-ranging advocacy on police oversight, including an email campaign led by the Justice for Abdirahman Coalition and actioned by nearly twenty thousand people from across the province, a slew of recommendations by a provincial judge and the passage of subsequent legislation.

When Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government came to power in 2018, it quickly rolled back Bill 175, the Safer Ontario Act. Its replacement legislation was a “complete capitulation” to police unions, according to Michael Bryant, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

So when Farhia Ahmed, the coalition’s chair, learned that Premier Ford expressed support for Black people this week, she could only laugh bitterly.

“It’s one thing to stand there and say you are in solidarity with Black communities, it’s another to remove the barriers to our full freedom and to the comfort we deserve in knowing that our police are there to protect us and will be held accountable if they don’t,” she told me in an interview.

Ahmed recalled the early days of organizing after the horrific death of the 37-year-old Abdi, a Somali-Canadian with mental-health issues who was apprehended after a distress call by patrons of a local coffee shop. He was pinned to the ground and struck repeatedly in the head by a police officer in broad daylight.

Like the killing of George Floyd in the United States, Abdi’s alleged murder was captured on video and similarly spurred protests and calls for justice.

“While there are similarities in these two deaths, there are striking differences in the immediate response of public officials,” reads a statement posted on Monday by the Coalition. “The key perpetrator in George Floyd’s death, officer Derek Chauvin, was arrested within days and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. While in the nation’s capital of Canada, Abdirahman Abdi’s alleged killer, remained employed without charges for approximately eight months. Today, nearly four years after Abdirahman’s death, Daniel Montsion remains a free man and earns six figures paid through tax payers dollars.”

Ensuring that police chiefs could suspend officers without pay in certain cases of misconduct was a key recommendation made by the coalition, and echoed in a comprehensive review of the 1990 Police Services Act by Justice Michael Tulloch. His report included recommendations that would see fines of up to $50,000 of officers refusing to comply with the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), as well as clearer guidelines governing standards of proof. There was also a call for more civilian investigators to oversee complaints, to counter the perception that police are often policing themselves.

It is the SIU that is now investigating the mysterious death of Toronto resident Regis Korchinski-Paquet. An Afro-Indigenous woman suffering from mental illness, she died last week after falling from her highrise after police were called to her home.

“Tulloch’s recommendations were intended to make the SIU more transparent and accountable to the public, particularly to Black and Indigenous communities,” said Ruth Goba, executive director of the Black Legal Action Centre in Toronto. “Without those reforms, there is no reason for us to now trust the investigation into [Korchinski-Paquet’s] death will be unbiased.”

Goba’s clinic has already been coping with other harmful policy decisions, including major funding cuts to legal aid. Its mandate is to combat individual and systemic anti-Black racism.

“It’s a really hard time for our communities right now,” she told me. “When things like this happen, there is a lot of public outcry and then, when publicity dies down, Black people are left in the same position that they were left in before. Any government must consider substantive change; speaking about discrimination doesn’t eliminate the disparities that Black people deal with whether in housing, employment, education or in the justice system.”

No it doesn’t. Besides, Ford’s record speaks for itself.