Categories
613-819 Black Hub Year in review

2022 – Another busy year for the Hub!

2022 was another busy year that saw the Hub work on issues related to education, health, business, municipal politics, addressing anti-Black racism nationally, climate change, Black federal public servants, police/criminal justice and more! 

Education – As a member of the Ottawa Carleton District School Board’s Valuing Voices Technical Advisory Group, the Hub continued to help the Board develop the best ways to share the identity-based data it collected in 2019. The data covers suspensions, sense of belonging at school and Grade 10 credit accumulation among other things. The data is a key tool for advocating for change so it’s crucial to make it as accessible and easy to use as possible for the public. One of the focuses this year was to figure out the schedule for refreshing the data on a regular basis.

The Hub also presented at the May Board meeting where trustees unanimously defeated a motion to reinstate the School Resource Officer program. The Board had ended the SRO program in 2021 after it did a human rights-based evaluation that found the program had been harmful to Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ students.

A Hub representative was part of the Loran Scholarship assessment team. The $100,000 Loran Scholarship was founded in 1988 as the first national undergraduate award based on a mix of academic achievement, extracurricular activity and leadership potential. However, no one the Hub spoke with had heard about it and we noticed there weren’t many Black faces among the pictures of past Loran scholars. Being part of the assessment team, which we will continue doing, allows us to help get more Black students to possibly get scholarships.

Health – The Hub was a member of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership’s Health and Wellbeing Sector Table. The group met regularly during the COVID-19 pandemic to share data on Black communities aimed at overcoming barriers to getting more Black folks vaccinated.

We also presented our Non-Police Mental Health Crisis Response for the City of Ottawa report to the Guiding Council on Mental Health and Addictions. The Ottawa Police Service created the Guiding Council in January 2021. It was moved under the City after public outcry about the police leading the initiative. The Council’s stated mandate is “to establish a strategy to support an enhanced or new Mental Health and Addiction crisis response system that will improve the outcomes for those experiencing crises related to mental health and substance use in the City of Ottawa.” However, its terms of reference say it’s working towards a system that will still include police “when the crisis is linked to criminal activity…”. 

People called for a different system partly because of the police-involved deaths of Abdirahman Abdi and Greg Ritchie. People called the police on Abdi because he was allegedly touching women in a coffee shop and on Greg Ritchie, an Indigenous man, because they said they saw a man with a knife – that turned out to be a ceremonial tomahawk. As touching women and carrying knives are both criminal activities, both men would likely end up just as dead under the “new” system the Guiding Council is working to create. The Council’s terms of reference say nothing about shifting money now spent on mental health response from the OPS to other organizations once the OPS stops doing it. The Hub presented our detailed plan for a system that involves no police and will shift money saved to social services that address the root causes of criminal activity.

We also attended the excellent Mental Health of Black Communities conference hosted by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Black Health and the Vulnerability, Trauma, Resilience & Culture Research Laboratory (V-TRaC), led by Dr. Jude Mary Cénat.

Business – Ever since cannabis was legalized the Hub has been saying Black folks should get into the business that’s now dominated by white men. With this in mind, the Hub attended Health Canada’s 2022 Cannabis Licensing – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Forum focussed on diversifying the industry. Afterwards, we connected with Michael and Ashley Athill, brother/sister owners/founders of HRVSTR Cannabis. We spoke about how the Hub could find a place in the industry with our skill set. Right now we’re working on a business model that would have us work to help people clear their criminal pot records and get into the business. They would then give the Hub a cut of their profits.

The Hub also attended the launch of, and a two-day conference on, the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub to learn about the latest data on Black business – and connect with some of the key folks producing it.

Municipal politics – The Hub participated in Ottawa’s Oct. 24 election by attending debates and asking candidates questions focused on Black community interests and helping organize a school trustee meet and greet. We created a document with information on candidates’ position on key issues of concern to Black Ottawa residents, canvassed door-to-door and had a rep as a panelist on Rogers TV Ottawa’s election night panel. 

Federal government – The Hub led the push for the Government of Canada to appoint a Black Equity Commissioner similar to the permanent Special Envoy on antisemitism and new Special Representative on Islamophobia it announced in its 2022 Budget. Beyond the obvious reason of simple equity, there are other reasons for appointing a Black Equity Commissioner. Firstly, with a little under two years left in the U.N. Decade for People of African Descent, which runs from 2015-2024, the Commissioner will help ensure addressing anti-Black racism remains a federal focus after the Decade ends. Secondly, with Statistics Canada reporting that Black Canadians faced the most hate crimes in Canada in 2020 and other data showing Black Canadians continue to be disproportionately negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of affordable housing, under-employment and other social determinants of health the Commissioner is more essential than any moment in recent history to safeguard and expand substantive equality rights for Black people. In December, the Hub called for the Black Equity Commissioner at the Black Parliamentary Caucus pre-budget consultation in Ottawa, got an opinion piece published in the Ottawa Citizen and reached out nationally to get support for the commissioner from Black groups.

Climate change – The Hub spoke in September at the Ottawa chapter of the global Climate Strike in Ottawa the theme of which was “Together for Climate Justice”. The Hub pointed out how the reports from the international Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, and mainstream press reports about climate change say climate change started with, and continues to be caused by, “human activity” and how “we” must all come together to fix it. These reports make it sound like all humans contributed equally to starting climate change and are all contributing equally to making it worse. In fact, the climate crisis has its origins in the actions of a select group of humans responsible for the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of African people, colonialism and capitalism. That select group of humans forced millions of enslaved Africans to work – sometimes literally to death – on mono-culture plantations that destroyed the soil. That same group drove the Industrial Revolution that was literally launched, and fuelled, by the violently coerced labour of enslaved Africans and created capitalism which, in its global excesses, values profits above people and the planet and has led us to the climate crisis we have today. 

Policing/criminal justice – The Hub continued its efforts to push for City Council and the Ottawa Police Services Board to reimagine public safety in Ottawa. We issued a news release and did several media interviews about the resignation of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly in the midst of the “Freedom Convoy”. We questioned the racist, angry Black man narrative leaked by OPS sources accusing Sloly of bullying and volatile behaviour that compromised the force’s ability to cope with the truck protest. We also presented regularly at Ottawa Police Services Board meetings calling for them to move money from the police to social services that actually make us all safer like housing and mental health. Just like journalist Desmond Cole had taken over a Toronto Police Services Board meeting in 2017 to demand the Toronto Police delete the data they collected from carding Black Torontonians, we took over the November 30 Ottawa Police Services Board meeting and refused to leave until they answered questions related to accountability of the Ottawa Police Service. Shortly after, we attended the OPS’ 7th Annual Human Rights Learning Forum and asked questions related to the issues we raised when we took over the OPSB meeting. Finally, we filed several complaints against the OPSB and OPS leadership with the Ontario Civilian Police Commission and the Office of the Independent Police Review Director for actions that helped the police but harmed public safety.

International – The Hub provided input to the Canadian delegation attending the first meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent in Dec. 5-7 in Geneva. The Forum will be an advisory body to the UN Human Rights Council, in line with the program of activities for the implementation of the UN International Decade for People of African Descent, which runs from 2015 to 2024.

In addition to all this, we supported local initiatives including:

  • Attending the Oct. 7 candlelight vigil for Anthony Aust marking the 2nd anniversary of his death following an Ottawa police raid on his 12th floor apartment
  • Joining graduating Black students on their symbolic Walk of Excellence from Lisgar High School to the University of Ottawa
  • Attending the federal Black Class Action’s press conference with Amnesty International where they announced they were filing a complaint with the United Nations regarding the status of Blacks in Canada.
  • Attending the Brotherhood Coalition’s Let’s Talk Black Men’s Mental Health BBQ
  • Attending the 3rd National Black Canadians Summit in Halifax 
  • Having a Hub table at the 2nd HorizonFest community group gathering hosted by our partner group Horizon Ottawa.
  • Meeting with the heads of Queen’s University Black Studies program to discuss how Blackademics and Blacktivists can work together 
  • Attending the inauguration of Awad Ibrahim as the first Air Canada Chair on Anti-Racism
  • Working with the international Can’t Buy My Silence campaign against the misuse of non-disclosure agreements to hide human rights abuses
  • Being a member of the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa’s Race and Faith Based Advisory Committee addressing the over representation of Black youth in care
  • Hub coordinator Robin Browne co-hosting rabble.ca’s monthly Off the Hill political panel
  • Supporting Jaku Konbit’s mentorship program by mentoring a Black youth and attending program meetings.
  • Speaking to university and high school social justice classes

It was a busy year and we look forward to continuing the work in 2023!

Categories
613-819 Black Hub Heroes Hub Freedom School Statues

Canada needs more Black heroes

Our last 613-819 Black Hub Freedom School class was about hero building, sparked by the debate over what to do with statues of people who did really nasty things in the past.

One of our main goals was to come up with a recommendation on what position the Hub should take on whether to take such statues down. Ottawa mayor, Jim Watson, was recently quoted as saying he was against taking down statues of Sir John A. MacDonald because “he was the first leader of our country – warts and all.” Some citizens had been calling for MacDonald’s statues to be removed due to his documented racist views and actions against Indigenous people.

We didn’t decide on a position, as there’s still more discussion needed, but we gained some valuable insights into how societies create heroes, how that impacts our daily lives – and what we should do about.

We talked about how we learn about heroes from an early age, one of the first ways being from fairy tales. As Black kids, we were exposed to lots of heroes that didn’t look like us. They were in books, on TV, in movies, on cereal boxes – even on our clothing. If your parents did the extra work you might also have been exposed to heroes like Anansi the Spider – but only in books.

We talked about how the heroe-building machine works so well that characters like Robin Hood are known globally. I pointed out that, no matter where I have travelled, people make the same joke when they learn my name: “Like Robin Hood!” (“Like Batman and Robin!” is a distant second.) This happened even in West Africa.

We talked about Canadian national heroes and who has the power to create them. The ones that came immediately to mind were people like Sir John A. MacDonald and Terry Fox. Although we could have mentioned Viola Desmond, Donovan Bailey or any of the championship Toronto Raptors – no one did. We did spend a lot of time talking about sports heroes, however, when we moved from talking about make believe heroes to real ones.

The first thing we discussed was that sports heroes, like all real life heroes, aren’t actually “real” as their hero image is carefully crafted to leave out the bad stuff – unless the bad stuff is central to their image like Michael Jordan’s former Chicago Bulls team mate, Dennis Rodman. Sports heroes are made by the marketing machine of those that own the teams they play on. In the stadium, they model physical excellence, team work, competitive spirit and tenacity. Outside the stadium, some of them model community service. However, unlike fairy tale princes or super heroes, sports heroes don’t confront the powerful – especially the powers that control their sports. What happened to kneeling quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, is an example of what awaits Black athletes who break that rule (in contrast, American soccer star, Megan Rapinoe, is still playing despite having kneeled in solidarity with Kaeperinick in 2016).

Looking at Black sports heroes and Viola Desmond, the rules would appear to be that Black sports stars can be made heroes if they shut up and play and others can become heroes if they take an individual, non-violent stand against injustice. Black folks who aren’t playing with someone else’s balls and are challenging the system now, aren’t heroes – they’re trouble makers. And things get really bad when those trouble makers run into some other heroes: the police.

We’re taught from an early age that cops are good. We see them helping old ladies in children’s books, talking with Mr. Rogers and as pieces to add to our happy Lego cities. We see them in kids movies and TV shows usually coming to arrest the bad guys. But, just like sports heroes, these images of cops aren’t real. They omit the bad stuff and that means that folks that don’t have bad experiences with cops (i.e. most white people) grow up thinking cops are all good. The problem with that is, when a cop beats up or kills a Black person, most white people’s first thought is, “Well, cops are good so the Black person must have done something wrong.”

This is why Canada needs more Black heroes: so everyone gets brought up learning about a lot more Black folks who are all good too. (They need to learn about real, complex Black folks too but, hey, baby steps.)

We need more Canadian Black Panther/T’Challas, more Black teachers kids can look up to and more Canadian Zumbis. Who is Zumbi you ask?

In 2016, my family and I went to the Rio Olympics in Brazil. We spent the first part of our trip in Rio and the second part in the former colonial capital, Salvador. One day, while walking near Salvador’s town square, we came upon this statue:

It’s of Zumbi Dos Palmares who, according to Wikipedia, “was a Brazilian of Kongo origin and one of the pioneers of resistance to slavery of Africans by the Portuguese in Brazil. He was also the last of the kings of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who had liberated themselves from enslavement in that same settlement, in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. Zumbi today is revered in Afro-Brazilian culture as a powerful symbol of resistance against the enslavement of Africans in the colony of Brazil.”

Zumbi has his own national day of celebration and an international airport named after him:

This would be like having a international airport named after Louis Riel in Canada or Nat Turner in the US. (I can see Nat Turner International Airport having signs up saying, “If you see something you don’t like, please revolt.”)

My position on the statues is leave them up but put up plaques telling their whole story – warts and all. And put up statues of folks like Rocky Jones and Rosemary Brown.

As for sport heroes, if we don’t like the fact that they’re told to shut and play, maybe we should speak up and stop paying to see games until the athletes are allowed to speak up too.

Categories
#TFTP #wetoo 613-819 Black Hub FBEC Government of Canada Plantation tales

Tales from the Plantation #2

When I left off my story in Tales from the Plantation #1, the formal work action plan, and the manager who had imposed it on me, were both gone and I was back working in the buildings from which I had been banned, as if nothing had happened.

I worked like this for months, feeling a bit like Keanu Reeves’ character Mr. Anderson from The Matrix. All my colleagues seemed unaware that we worked in a place that bans people from buildings for asking questions.

In the summer, I asked for the opportunity to work with an organization outside the government on interchange. Most interchanges are for one year and the organization you go to pays your salary. Interchanges are one of the many privileges, like french training, travel and acting opportunities, that me and other Black employees would often see our white colleagues get but would rarely get ourselves. I asked to go for a two year interchange, paid entirely by ECCC, and they agreed.

I started on interchange with the Federation of Black Canadians (FBC) in January 2019. Around my third day, I was forwarded an email from an FBC steering committee member, who had decided to resign, who described problems with the organization in terms of lack of competency, transparency, accountability – and even basic humanity among steering committee members. I was shocked, as I had chosen to go on interchange with FBC because everything I knew about it, before receiving this person’s email, was great. They had co-organized the inaugural National Black Canadians Summit, in Toronto in December 2017, with the Michaelle Jean Foundation and their leader was Judge Donald McLeod who had a fairy tale back story having overcome the adversities of growing up in Toronto’s Regent Park to become a lawyer then a judge.

However, shortly after starting with the FBC, I saw examples of every issue the departing steering committee raised – and more. Like I had done at ECCC, I questioned behaviour that I felt demonstrated a lack of transparency, competence and connection to community concerns. On May 27, the FBC terminated my interchange. In their email to my department announcing my termination, the FBC made 10 allegations against me including that I had “physically threatened my direct report” at the FBC, a completely false claim.

My ECCC manager at the time responded to the termination of my interchange by launching an investigation – against me. She hired a consultant who used to work at Correctional Services Canada and the Canadian Border Services Agency and whose LinkedIn profile showed no evidence of any investigative experience. After a five month investigation, during which he interviewed only me and my two FBC accusers, he found all 10 allegations “founded”.

I am currently in the process of suing the investigator for libel in small claims court and the manager who launched the investigation has since left the department.

In February 2019, I also filed a complaint against ECCC with the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC). I was reluctant to do this as I saw the CHRC as being quite ineffective in dealing with race-based complaints. (I’m old enough to remember what happened to whistle blower Shiv Chopra.) However, a friend convinced me, saying that it was important to get such complaints on record as one measure of the magnitude of the problem. So, I filed.

At first, the Commission acted as expected and sent me a letter saying they would not deal with my complaint. As the letter they sent was missing a page, they sent another one that had a glaring contradiction. In one paragraph, it said the Commission would not deal with my complaint because I hadn’t exhausted my departmental harassment process then, right below, there was a paragraph explaining how I had exhausted my departmental harassment process. I responded with a letter saying that I was co-founder of the Federal Black Employee Caucus, that I felt the CHRC was useless, and that them sending me an incomplete letter, followed by one with a glaring contradiction, showed that, not only are they not paying attention to detail, they’re definitely not paying attention to larger things like systemic discrimination and anti-Black racism. Two weeks later, they sent me a letter saying they would deal with my complaint.

Things moved quickly at first, with us getting through the mediation phase to the investigation phase in mere months (mediation failed). However, I have been informed that, having completed its investigation, the Commission is now deciding whether to dismiss my complaint or refer it to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and that this will take…two years. This, once again, renders the Commission useless to the many people who are suffering horrific harassment daily.

So what can people do? We’ll look at that more closely in TFTP #3.

For more on the Federation of Black Canadians, see Desmond Cole’s blog posts:

Black Tea—the truth about the Federation of Black Canadians

Steeped Tea—An update on the Federation of Black Canadians

Justice Donald McLeod resigns as chair of the Federation of Black Canadians—again

Note: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Black Employee Caucus. To contact an FBEC spokesperson use the Contact Us page on FBEC’s website.

Categories
613-819 Black Hub National Black Canadians Summit

Help send two Ottawa Black youth to the National Black Canadians Summit

******* UPDATE March 18 ******

We had to cancel the fundraising campaign as the Summit was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. When the Summit is back on, the campaign will be too!

****************************************

From March 20-22, Canada’s Black communities will converge in Halifax to celebrate the history of Black Nova Scotia and gather for the 3rd National Black Canadians Summit (NBCS). This year’s Summit is youth-led and youth focussed.

Help the voice of Ottawa’s youth be heard!

The 613/819 Black Hub is raising money to send two young people from an Ottawa community to the Summit so they can share their valuable knowledge and experience and learn from others.

The Summit is fast approaching (and we just came up with this idea) so we need your help ASAP!

Donate here: 613-819 Black Hub NBCS youth fund GoFundMe page

Together we grow stronger.