Every February, for Black History Month, students across Canada recite the names of black people who changed the world: Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah Winfrey. With the possible exception of Viola Desmond (whose face adorns our $10 bills), black Canadians are conspicuously absent from this list.
This needs to change, and politics is a good place to focus our early efforts.
Throughout our history, Black Canadians have led the way in politics. Abraham Shadd, cobbler, abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor, became Canada’s first elected black man in 1859.
Lincoln Alexander served as a wireless operator in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, then became a lawyer, Member of Parliament, Cabinet Minister, and finally Lieutenant Governor. He was, time after time, the first black Canadian to hold these positions.
Rosemary Brown, a social worker, gender equality activist and MPP from British Columbia, was the first black woman to run for the leadership of a party in Canada.
These are just a few examples of Black Canadians who have changed the world, broken down barriers, fought for the abolition of discriminatory laws and helped create electoral institutions that have made Canada a more equal country. Any history lesson that does not mention their accomplishments contributes to the erasure of these remarkable people.
Rather than celebrating our own heroes, we applaud those of our neighbors to the south, while flattering ourselves that we are not mired in the same racial tensions that plague the United States. But at the same time, we condemn to oblivion a whole section of our own history.
Go through archives
Over the past 20 years, more than 350 Black Canadians have sought election. You will not find an exhaustive list of these go-getters anywhere. It was only through the fierce determination of Taryn Rerrie, a resolute student who spent months sifting through records, that we came to a list of Black Canadians who either served as elected officials or ran for a term in elections. It is abnormal that such a monk’s work is necessary to get there.
The Library of Parliament maintains an extensive database of parliamentarians. We can extract parliamentarians who are women, those who have military experience or even those who died during their mandate. But there is nothing on ethnic diversity or any list of black parliamentarians. To some extent, this reality is explained by the fact that it is difficult to collect disaggregated data for racialized groups, but this is far from excusing everything.
In 2017, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination highlighted Canada’s shortcomings in disaggregating data for racialized groups on social and economic conditions. In its anti-racism strategy launched in 2019, the federal government pledged to better disaggregate data by race, but efforts to date have focused on the public service and compiling demographic data. Nothing has yet been done by elected officials about the composition of Parliament.
If an institution does not collect any data on ethnocultural identity, it can claim that this factor has no weight in its operation. In politics, on the other hand, the reality is quite different: numerous studies have shown that there are differences in the evaluation, nomination, recruitment, financial contributions and media coverage of candidates according to their race. Despite this, Parliament and legislatures are slow to collect and collate data on race.
Black History Month aims to celebrate the contributions of black people. But to do this, you must first pull them out of the shadows.
Among the efforts to achieve this is the first-ever national survey of Black Canadians who have run for elected office. This poll, now open, is run by Operation Black Vote Canada and Carleton University1. The results will shed light on what motivates black people to run for office, and their experience in the political arena. These stories will help us identify gaps, find solutions to fill them, and track progress over time. All these efforts will contribute to true representativeness.
Having better data on the breed means better conditions for the people concerned. This is something to celebrate.