In 2014, George “Knia” Singh was a law student who requested a ride-along with Toronto police. His request was denied because of information about him recorded by the police during numerous “street checks” starting when he was as young as 16.
A “street check” is when police stop and question someone even if they are not a suspect in a crime. In fact, sometimes, particularly in low-income neighbourhoods, police stop and question people, even if they are not investigating any particular crime.
When Mr. Singh was stopped and questioned, the information was recorded and kept by the police. This is what is known as “carding.” Studies show that racialized people, and in particular, young Black men, are disproportionately carded.
Mr. Singh, who has no criminal record, has started a legal action in the Divisional Court seeking a declaration that his constitutional right to equality before the law was breached on the grounds of race and colour, ancestry, ethnic origin and reprisal or threat of reprisal. He hopes that his application will serve as a deterrent to future conduct of a similar nature by police.
As of September 2016, Mr. Singh’s application is still awaiting a hearing date.
Quotes
“The test case funding LAO has provided for my judicial review is a prime example of how human rights and social justice can be protected by the effective allocation of provincial resources. Without their support this would be a daunting task for social justice advocates and lawyers. I am thankful to LAO and reassured that we have one of the world’s best legal aid systems.”
— Knia Singh
“Although legislative changes have recently been introduced to regulate the practice of ‘street checks’ and ‘carding,’ LAO is supporting this case, as part of its Racialized Communities Justice Strategy, to test the constitutionality of these practices. LAO is committed to working with communities to ensure that government regulations are enforced.”
— Kimberly Roach, Co-Lead, Racialized Communities Strategy
Wayne van der Meide, one of Legal Aid Ontario’s (LAO) co-leads for its Racialized Communities Strategy, experienced an “astonishing” moment when he was meeting with a settlement agency to talk about what LAO does.
“It was astonishing when we would say LAO could cover all of these different legal issues and the response was, ‘Really?’” Wayne recalls. “It just felt like LAO had dropped the ball in terms of getting the word out about how it can help.”
That’s something that Wayne and his co-lead, Kimberly Roach, have heard over and over again as they’ve begun meeting with community agencies that work predominantly with racialized communities. He continues to be surprised that there’s still such a lack of understanding about Canadians’ rights, what LAO does and the availability of legal aid services.
A mother who knew to “fight back”
Wayne knows what a big difference it makes when you understand your rights.
Though he was born in Canada, his family moved to Trinidad when he was nine. When they returned to Canada several years later, he remembers how the school wanted him to repeat a year because they didn’t accept that the education system in Trinidad was, as Wayne puts it, “essentially a year advanced.”
“It gets better,” he recalls. “They wanted to put me in ESL. And, I don’t know if you know this, but Trinidadians speak English—that’s our language.”
Fortunately for Wayne, he has a mother who was also a Canadian and who knew to fight back, insisting he didn’t need to be held back or put into ESL.
“Most of my best friends, then and now, are racialized people, who did not have that advantage and weren’t so lucky.”
A lack of awareness about rights in racialized communities
Wayne believes public legal education needs to be more of a core function at LAO.
He firmly supports LAO’s current work of translating some of its brochures and fact sheets, which explains its services, into some of the most requested languages. It’s just one simple step towards better serving a vast population comprised of many communities.
In addition, various districts have advice lawyers doing community outreach—but he thinks there needs to be more of this type of work because it’s so critically important.
He points to an example of meeting with social justice workers who were deeply committed to helping others, but who still didn’t understand that treating everyone the same” wasn’t necessarily the most helpful one for reaching everyone in need of services.
He recalls asking, “Is there anything you do different here to ensure that you are effectively reaching out to and serving members of racialized communities?”
The answer, with great pride, was, “Absolutely not. We treat everybody equally.”
Wayne adds, “My point is: if services that are accessible to rich people are equally available to poor people, there’s a good chance that they’re not accessible to poor people.”
Broadening the conversation about race
“Sometimes, when you talk to people about issues surrounding race, they immediately get defensive,” Wayne said. “People think of racism as some sort of moral issue. If I am happy to welcome a Black person to dinner, I am not a racist.”
But, as Wayne puts it, “That does not mean that we don’t have an obligation to fix systems that discriminate against racialized people.”
Wayne thinks a broader conversation needs to be had about the experiences of racialized people and the systemic disadvantages that they face—disadvantages that are not in plain sight.
Drawing on a sense of “otherness”
To a certain extent, he understands what those disadvantages are. Wayne always felt a sense of “otherness” because he had one foot in several different identities.
“I’m mixed race, for one thing,” he explains. “My father is White, and my mother is South Asian from Trinidad. Plus, I’m gay. And I’ve never felt like I could fully be myself in the Caribbean community, in the gay community, or in any of the various social spheres that I’ve been set in.”
He applauds the Black Lives Matter sit-in at the Toronto Pride Parade, which essentially ground festivities to a halt. Alexandra Williams, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter in Toronto, told media outlets, “It’s always the appropriate time to make sure folks know about the marginalization of black people, of black queer youth, black trans youth, of black trans people.”
Wayne thinks that the actions of Black Lives Matter at the Pride Parade are a clear example of how “the LGBTQ community includes a wide population of racialized and low-income people—and Pride Toronto has lost touch with them.”
Re-engaging with the community
The fact is, over the past 20 years, there has been an overrepresentation of racialized communities in the justice system. While people of colour make up almost 26% of Ontario’s population, 19% of Ontario’s families from racialized communities live in poverty, compared to just 6% from non-racialized communities.
This state of poverty has led to a variety of issues including increased rates of homelessness, lack of access to education, fair work, healthcare or police protection, and barriers to employment and overrepresentation in low-paying, unstable jobs. Added to this is a disproportionate rate of over-policing and overrepresentation in jails and prisons.
This is why both Wayne and his co-lead, Kimberly, recognize the importance of talking to the people—whether they’re clients or community agencies or social justice workers.
“It’s so important to re-engage and to hear what people have to say,” he said. “To really understand an issue, you have to talk to the people most affected by it. You have to speak with people on the ground, who have lived experience with the justice system or who have worked directly with people who are in the justice system.”
As part of the first phase of the racialized communities strategy, Wayne and Kim have already been meeting with a wide array of community agencies. Next year, they will use the information gathered through their research and meetings to produce a consultation paper, which will suggest options for further changes LAO can make.
The consultation paper will serve as a platform for more grassroots consultations across the province.
In this first phase of the Racialized Communities Strategy, we are meeting with a wide array of stakeholders working in communities and/or the justice system.
During these meetings, we discuss and gather feedback on a number of issues.
The discussions are participant-driven, but usually focus on the perspectives of one or more racialized communities, often as those perspectives intersect with other identities such as gender, age, disability, etc.
To guide the discussion, we usually pose a number of questions, such as:
What is or isn’t working well in terms of Legal Aid Ontario’s rules and processes?
Are there any types of legal issues that impact your community(ies) for which there are no legal aid services available?
Are there ways in which legal aid services are provided that limit their effectiveness to your community(ies)?
Are there other agencies and people that we should speak with, and do you have recommendations as to how to effectively engage with these stakeholders?
To date, we have met with the following stakeholders:
African Canadian Legal Clinic
Afrikan Canadian Prisoners Advocacy Coalition
Alexandra Park Community Centre
Arab Canadian Lawyers Association
Black Action Defence Committee
Black Community Action Network of Peel
Canadian Association of Black Lawyers
Canadian Training Institute
Catholic Centre for Immigrants – Ottawa
Centre Des Services Communautaires de Vanier
Centre for Spanish Speaking Peoples
Centre Francophone de Toronto
Chinese Canadian National Council of Toronto
Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change
Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers
Réseaux en immigration francophone
Hamilton Community Legal Clinic
Human Rights Legal Support Centre
India Rainbow Community Services
Jamaican Canadian Association
Jane and Finch Community Legal Clinic
Korean Canadian Lawyers Association
Korean Canadian Women’s Association
Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC)
Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic
Midaynta Community Services
Mississauga Community Legal Services
Mount Sinai Hospital – “Because We Care”
North Peel & Dufferin Community Legal Services
Ontario Association of Childrens’ Aid Societies – “ONE VISION ONE VOICE: Changing the Child Welfare System for African Canadians”
Ontario Human Rights Commission
Rexdale Community Legal Clinic
Somali Centre for Family Services – Ottawa
South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario
South Asian Women’s Centre
Tropicana Community Services
United Way of Peel Region Black Community Advisory Council
Urban Alliance on Race Relations
World Sikh Organization (WSO)
World Skills Employment Centre – Ottawa
Over the next three or four months, we will continue to meet with stakeholders.
The province has put together a team to conduct an independent review of the Special Investigations Unit, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, and the Ontario Civilian Police Commission to:
make recommendations on how to enhance transparency and accountability of the police oversight bodies while preserving fundamental rights
ensure the police oversight bodies are effective and have clear mandates
reduce overlap and inefficiencies between these bodies.
The team, led by the Honourable Michael H. Tulloch, begins consultations across the province starting Sept. 14.
New approaches to child welfare are urgently needed to address the over-representation of certain groups among children in child welfare care. These approaches must be informed by good research and take full account of cultural and linguistic needs and experiences of historical and contemporary institutional racism which place children and their families at higher risk for child welfare intervention. Recognizing this need, the Journal of Law and Social Policy (JLSP), Osgoode Hall Law School, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, the African Canadian Legal Clinic, and The Action Group on Access to Justice are pleased to host a symposium, “Re-imagining Child Welfare Systems in Canada.” The symposium will bring together academics, practitioners, community-based organizations and those with lived experience to foster conversation, deepen analyses, and re-imagine radically different child welfare systems.
The Symposium will feature keynote speaker Cindy Blackstock, Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Toronto, and lunchtime speaker Kike Ojo, project lead of “One Vision One Voice: Changing the Child Welfare System for African Canadians.”
Panels throughout the day will address issues such as:
the implications of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision in the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society case for self-government in child welfare;
community-based and community-led models that draw upon culturally-based knowledge;
the importance of good data; and
the complex interplay between child welfare involvement and systems of oppression.
The symposium will be held October 21, 2016 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in room 1014 Osgoode (Helliwell Centre).
For the past year, One Vision One Voice has been consulting with the African Canadian community and Children’s Aid Societies across the province to develop a Practice Framework to support better outcomes for African Canadians who are involved with the child welfare system.
One Vision One Voice is a community-led project facilitated by the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies aimed at improving child welfare services to the African Canadian community in Ontario.
The project will be hosting a symposium on September 29, 2016 at the Sheraton Airport Hotel, to launch the One Vision One Voice Practice Framework, companion documents Part I: The Research Report and Part II: Race Equity Practices.
At the symposium, you will hear from the Ministry of Child and Youth Services and the Anti-Racism Directorate, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and the office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth. You will also get the opportunity to hear from members of the African Canadian community about their experiences with the child welfare system.
Even before Kimberly Roach started co-leading Legal Aid Ontario’s (LAO) Racialized Communities Strategy, she saw firsthand the need for a strategy to address the needs of racialized communities.
As a child, she moved from Jamaica to the Parkdale neighbourhood in Ontario and into apartments that she describes as “notorious.” She remembers the conditions were “horrible.” The majority of the tenants—new immigrants, many working in precarious jobs because of language barriers and discrimination—were exploited.
The tenants organized a tenants’ association. Kim’s stepfather, at one point, became the head of this association while Kim helped to raise awareness about tenants’ rights by delivering information flyers to all of the apartments in the 19-storey building that they lived in. The local clinic helped the tenants to take the landlord to court.
“We were poor—so lawyers weren’t accessible to us and the clinic provided the first legal help that we received,” she said. “It was the first time I could see the power lawyers had to help people.”
The early road towards a career in social justice
At one point, when she was 9 years old, Kim’s family took in a friend and her daughter when her partner abandoned her before sponsorship papers were filed. A domestic violence survivor, this friend—and Kim’s family—did not know about LAO.
To help her friend, Kim’s mother, who was a factory worker, put money towards hiring someone they thought was a lawyer Kim’s family friend was ultimately deported along with her child.
“Years later, when I was getting ready for law school, my mother made me promise to be a lawyer who helped people in need,” she remembers. “So those experiences and that promise to her is what pushed me towards social justice.”
A long overdue strategy for racialized communities
Though she worked at a number of clinics, Dundurn Community Legal Services and Rexdale Community Legal Clinic stand out because it was in a highly racialized area with a high level of poverty.
“We had a lot of repeat clients—and it felt like we were putting Band-Aids on issues,” she said. “I could see the gaps where people were falling through the system.”
Just as she had observed in her childhood experiences, poverty and race, coupled with the fact that many people simply don’t know about legal aid, have led to a complete lack of understanding of their rights and how to get help to assert those rights.
A detailed look at the issues
LAO will be creating a Racialized Communities Strategy, which will expand legal aid services that better address the needs of racialized clients.
As part of the strategy, Kim and co-lead, Wayne van der Meide, have been meeting with various groups like child protection agencies. Even before the media reports started surfacing about the high numbers of Black and Aboriginal kids in care, they were starting to get a clearer sense of the issue.
“I’ve had clients involved with Children’s Aid, but I didn’t realize the volume of Black kids in care—that was shocking,” she says.
LAO started offering more coverage for more child protection issues last year—and highlighting what parents’ rights are. Word is slowly getting out to people that legal help is available even before things get to a point where people have to go to family court.
Kim mentions how, once teachers call Children’s Aid—even if it’s for something that Children’s Aid doesn’t handle, like when a child is misbehaving in school or when there are altercations between children—there’s still a duty to investigate. Too often, things can escalate quickly from there. A lawyer can often help families navigate the child protection system and resolve matters before they go to court.
Kim sees a recurring issue of parents not knowing their family’s rights. Whether it’s within the child protection system or the education system, many families are unaware that of the rights they have within the system, including the right to have a lawyer representing them.
In a report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, interviews revealed there was a general feeling that school discipline policies have more of an impact on Black students and other racial minority communities, including the Tamil, Aboriginal and Latin American communities.
Based on early engagement sessions with various communities, she’s heard about how families are increasingly seeking out legal advice or representation for school disciplinary matters such as expulsion hearings.
The need to raise more awareness about legal aid
Kim and Wayne are currently working on a consultation paper that they will use to guide discussions with various communities. It’s their hope to get a better sense of how LAO can make changes to assist the largest number of clients.
One consistent theme has been the need for LAO to build more awareness about what it does and how people can access its services. It is Kim and Wayne’s hope that, by working with and developing relationships with people from all of the various communities that they have met with, they can empower people through knowledge.
Another thing Kim keeps hearing about is the need for LAO’s information available in other languages besides English and French. A recent initiative to begin translating various LAO brochures into the top requested languages is just one example of measures LAO is taking.
Kim says that, in listening to what people are saying, they will get a better understanding of what the issues are—and that, by working together with communities and agencies serving the communities, LAO can take steps towards addressing the various needs identified by the many communities that LAO serves.
“We need to look at who we’re serving and ask if we’re serving those who need our help? We need to ask how we are serving those communities and are we as accessible as the communities need us to be?” she states.
Often, the legal problems of the poor are associated with or are linked to their social, economic and personal concerns.
Kim says, “Our aim is to take a more comprehensive approach to the problems of racialized clients.”
LAO’s consultation isn’t slated to start until later in the year, when Kim and Wayne will begin meeting with various representatives in different communities. It will offer them an opportunity to hear directly from the people who are most affected by inequities in the justice system and give LAO a sense of how the organization can better serve its clients.
In the meantime, both leads continue to meet with advocacy groups and community agencies.
Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) made 27 recommendations for the development of the Strategy for a Safer Ontario, a new blueprint for policing.
LAO’s submission to the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services is based on its own understanding of the legal needs of vulnerable client groups. The submission focuses on:
education and training programs for police service personnel
In 2014, Ayaan Farah lost her job because the RCMP alleged she had a connection to the Dixon Crew, an Etobicoke street gang.
Transport Canada revoked her security clearance at her job of eight years at Pearson International Airport because of these allegations—and, as a result, lost her job.
On August 15, 2016, a Federal Court judge ruled in favour of Ms. Farah and ruled that Transport Canada’s decision was based on two “sparse allegations” provided by the Toronto police in 2014 as part of a security review.
In an opinion piece, Desmond Cole wrote, “Her experience shows how racial profiling, carding, and excessive surveillance threaten people who shouldn’t even be on the police’s radar.”
Article originally published on August 16, 2016 (Available in English only)
After a two-year battle with Transport Canada, Ayaan Farah could have her security clearance and job restored.
A Federal Court judge quashed the decision to revoke the US Airways employee’s security clearance, because Transport Canada failed to give her enough information to defend herself against allegations of links to individuals with criminal records.
Article originally published on January 14, 2016 (Available in English only)
All of us know someone who has been charged with or convicted of a crime. Most of us don’t think this connection could cost us our employment. This is exactly what happened to Ayaan Farah a couple of years ago. She lost her security clearance at Pearson airport, and the job that went with it, after police claimed she had connections to a local gang, and was a potential threat to airline safety.
The following post was originally published on rabble.ca on July 25, 2016 by Vince Wong, a staff lawyer with the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic.
Two weeks ago, Regent Park bore witness to possibly the most candid public discussion on racism with high level decision-makers in Ontario’s history.
With racial tensions bubbling to the forefront, it was both appropriate and timely for the province’s fledgling Anti-Racism Directorate to hold a public forum on systemic racism.
One by one, top politicians from Premier Kathleen Wynne, to Mayor John Tory, to the new Ontario Minister of Anti-Racism, Michael Coteau sat silently while listening and taking heat from the emotionally charged crowd.
As was expected, the atmosphere at the meeting was a complex amalgam of pain, frustration, but also of hope and opportunity — particularly with respect to a coordinated government strategy addressing systemic racism.
In this respect, the new Anti-Racism Directorate aims to tackle systemic racism at a broad level through policy, research, public awareness and community collaboration. However, the Directorate’s work, and in effect its very existence, will always be resisted and threatened by some unless common underlying myths about racism are first addressed in the public sphere.
Myth #1: Systemic racism in Canada has already been eliminated, or at the very least, is getting better.
In a 2012 Angus-Reid poll, the majority of Canadians, some 55 per cent, said that they believed racism was no longer a significant problem in Canada. This view is, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, wilful blindness. It ignores the fact that racism is a structural problem and severe racial disparities can take shape in Canada even in the absence of any intentional or explicit discrimination.
The data shows us that systemic racism is not getting better. If anything, it is getting much worse, particularly for the most vulnerable and marginalized in racialized communities.
In Toronto, for example, between 1980 and 2000, poverty rates among racialized families increased an astounding 361 per cent, while falling 28 per cent for non-racialized families. Data from our last Federal long-form census indicated that after-tax poverty rates among racialized families in Canada were some three times higher than non-racialized families. For certain communities, that number further increases to four, five and even six times the non-racialized poverty rate.
These statistics speak to the widening chasm that exists in quality of life along racial lines in our country.
Myth #2: Systemic racism primarily occurs in policing.
While racism in policing is often the area that gets the most attention and press because of heated and frequently violent interactions, it is part of a larger and more complex systemic issue. This is why reforming the police and criminal justice systems in our province alone cannot hope to solve significant racial inequities, whose root causes reside further upstream.
Numerous studies over the years have shown that racial inequities persist and in many cases are widening in a whole host of different arenas including education, employment, health, housing, as well as policing and criminal justice.
This is one of the reasons why an institution, like the Directorate, which can serve as a centralized authority on racism, mandate the collection of race-based disaggregated data, and co-ordinate and execute a targeted anti-racism strategy, is, in theory, an excellent idea. How well it will work in practice remains to be seen.
Myth #3: The race problem will just go away if we stop talking about it.
Canadians are enamoured with the narrative that this country has already found the “winning formula” when it comes to race relations and is an oasis of racial harmony in the world, particularly with the concurrent rise of racist and xenophobia movements in America and Western Europe.
So ingrained is this view in the very core of our national psyche that people who challenge it are often dismissed as ungrateful whiners, troublemakers and threats to society.
This denial has resulted in an atmosphere where people are bringing to the race discussion enormously different assumptions and understandings of what the reality on the ground is. The discussions that take place in such a space are poorly informed, polarizing and ultimately not constructive.
We need to create a space in public discourse to talk about racism and racial inequities without all the baggage that the rose-coloured multicultural narrative brings with it. We need to be able to have a mature, evidence-based discussion about race which leads to concrete, sustainable, and effective government action. This can only occur when we shed these preconceived myths, acknowledge that systemic racism is a real problem, and work together collectively and collaboratively to solve it.
The Regent Park meeting was a good start to this discussion. Let’s make sure that it does not end there.
