In Hugh Burnett's home town, "whites only" signs were common in store and restaurant windows. While Rosa Parks was refusing to sit at the back of the bus, Burnett, a black World War II veteran, waged his own epic court battle against racial segregation. His tireless activism led to laws prohibiting segregation. For his efforts, Burnett's community boycotted his carpentry business and ran him out of town.
It sounds like a typical story from 1950s Alabama or Mississippi. However, this piece of racial history went down in Dresden, Ontario.
Canada has made tentative steps in acknowledging racism in our past, like aboriginal residential schools and the Chinese head tax. But there is a tendency to view these as isolated events of history. With our national rhetoric of a tolerant and multicultural society, many Canadians bristle at the suggestion that racial discrimination was and is a force in Canada.
In school, we learned about Canada's proud role in the Underground Railroad. We weren't taught that when the escaped slaves arrived here, they and their descendants would face discrimination and segregation. We know more about Rosa Parks than Hugh Burnett. We didn't learn that Canadian icons like John A. MacDonald and Nellie McClung held racist views even their contemporaries found extreme. Or that the Royal Canadian Navy and Air Force had explicit whites-only recruitment rules up until the start of World War II.
Fast forward to today. African-Canadian veteran Wally Fowler held a press conference on March 13 pleading for an inquiry into racism in the Canadian Forces. Before his discharge in 2003, Fowler and his family endured racism at three different military bases. In one incident, fellow soldiers threw bananas at his wife, calling her a "monkey." The military ombudsman has twice refused to investigate Fowler's complaints. A National Defense spokesperson has replied to media inquiries about Fowler's case, saying the military has a zero tolerance policy for discrimination. However, at Fowler's press conference Rubin Coward, another black military vet, said: "I cannot, of good conscience, encourage any minorities to join the Canadian Armed Forces."
Philip Oreopoulos conducted a telling experiment in 2009. The University of British Columbia economics professor looked for advertised jobs in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. He created fake résumés with experience tailored to those jobs. On some he put common English names. On others, he used Chinese or South Asian names. The result: with the same experience, John Martin is 40 per cent more likely to get a job callback than Sana Khan.
A 2012 study at Simon Fraser University found that a visible minority man earns 18 per cent less in the Canadian workplace than a Caucasian man with the exact same education and experience.
The Canadian Mint was accused of racism in 2010 when it changed a proposed design for the $100 bill. The image of a scientist with Asian features was replaced with a scientist of "neutral ethnicity"--a Caucasian. To equate "neutral ethnicity" with Caucasian is to say that white people are the norm--excluding everyone else.
This month the Ontario Provincial Police came under fire for collecting DNA samples from 100 migrant workers while seeking the perpetrator of a sexual assault near Vienna, Ontario. Many of the workers sampled bore no resemblance to the physical description of the attacker--apart from being black. In cities across Canada, minority populations have complained of "racial profiling" by police. Just like their American counterparts, African-Canadians bitterly joke about being pulled over for a DWB -- "Driving While Black."
Last fall Howard Sapers, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, released a scathing report about Canada's prison system. He pointed to "discriminatory behaviour and prejudicial attitudes" by correctional staff against minorities. Sapers said African-Canadian inmates in particular are more likely to be placed in maximum security institutions, to be put in disciplinary segregation, and to experience use of force by guards. They are also less likely to be released early despite the fact, according to Sapers, they are half as likely to reoffend compared to the rest of the prison population.
All these examples have been reported by media. But we tend to treat each as an isolated incident, rather than a piece in a bigger, more disturbing puzzle.
Rachel Décoste is a Haitian-Canadian blogger who researches and writes about racial issues in Canada. She tells us, although Canadians oppose racism, she faces a backlash whenever she suggests discrimination exists here. "Judging by the number of comments I receive, too many prefer to turn a blind eye or to deny outright that racial exclusion is a fact in our history and our present."
Only when we put the pieces together and admit there is a problem can we begin to address discrimination in Canada. Only then can we become the tolerant nation we aspire to be.
Craig and Marc Kielburger are co-founders of international charity and educational partner, Free The Children. Its youth empowerment event, We Day, is in 11 cities across North America this year, inspiring more than 160,000 attendees from over 4,000 schools. For more information, visit www.weday.com.