By Fareed Khan
The Canadian election has been called and voters will be going to the polls on September 20th to choose a new government. The election is seen as unnecessary and opportunistic, and is opposed by two-thirds of Canadians coming as it does during the Covid19 pandemic’s fourth wave.
The Liberals, Conservatives and NDP released their full campaign platforms for the 2021 federal election during the first week of the campaign, and they are filled with a broad range of policy commitments. However, it seems that the NDP and Liberals are the only two parties that have committed to policies to fight racism and hate in Canada in their platform, while the Conservatives seem to have largely ignored the issue.
The anti-racism activist group Canadians United Against Hate (CUAH) has evaluated the three major party’s campaign platforms through an anti-racism and anti-hate lens and has given the NDP top marks with a grade of “B” for their policy proposals to fight hate, bigotry and racism, followed by the Liberals who received a “C+” and the Conservatives at the bottome with an “F”.
According
to CUAH the grade given to the NDP’s anti-racism / anti-hate proposals is based
on the consistency of their stand on the issue of fighting hate, and the comprehensiveness
of their proposals which include commitments to confront racism and hate, uphold
LGBTQ2 rights, support Indigenous rights, and a series of policies that focus on fighting
hate crimes and online hate, and holding social media companies accountable for what is posted on their platforms.
As a party led by a racialized leader who has a lived experience with racism it is not surprising that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh would present a comprehensive set of proposals to fight racism and hate. Since becoming leader of the party he has experienced racism in public and in the House of Commons, and he understands the pain that Black, Indigenous and people of colour feel more than any other party leader. The NDP has also historically been the most progressive and first out of the gate when it comes to issues of racial justice, and addressing the issue of systemic racism, particularly within policing and the justice system.
While the Liberals also devote sections in their campaign platform to fighting racism in Canada, supporting the rights of the LGBTQ2 community, and addressing online hate, the jury is out on how committed they are to their policy proposals based on their past performance in addressing racism, their general slowness to take bold action around issues of hate since they were elected in 2015, and in particular their slow approach to dealing with justice for Indigenous people.
Canadian Muslims are also unhappy with the Liberals in light of the fact that following the Quebec City mosque massacre in 2017 community leaders implored the Trudeau government to take swift and decisive action to counter Islamophobia and white supremacy, but all they got was “thoughts and prayers”. It took another massacre of Muslims in London, Ontario this past June (three generations of a Muslim family) before Trudeau committed to real and meaningful action to fight Islamophobia and counter white supremacy.
The Trudeau government's record on dealing with Indigenous people also leaves much to be desired. Their years-long legal fight against First Nations children to overturn two Canadian Human Rights Tribunal rulings ordering Ottawa to compensate victims of the purposely underfunded child welfare system is seen as outrageous by Indigenous leaders. It flies in the face of Trudeau's repeated declarations since becoming prime minister that "no relationship is more important to his government than the one with Indigenous peoples." This record elicits a lot of cynicism among Black, Indigenous and people of colour about how committed a future Liberal government would be on matters of racial justice.
The Conservative Party’s grade of “F” is due to their lack of comprehensive policies in their campaign policy document on fighting hate and racism, or on addressing systemic racism in policing and the justice system in any significant way. Unlike the NDP and Liberals the Conservatives did not dedicate a specific section in their document to fighting racism, and where the issue of hate is mentioned it’s done in a very limited fashion with respect to hate on social media. The word "racism" is not even mentioned in the document, nor is there any reference to the Black Lives Matter protests, and there is no reference to systemic racism in policing. It is as if they have been blind and deaf to the thousands of people across the country marching in the streets this past year calling for racial justice, and demanding that governments take bold action against racism and hate.
Erin O’Toole and the Conservative Party need to do much better on fighting racism and hate given their history of promoting Islamophobic policies while in government, and previous party leaders turning a blind eye to candidates and MPs who have made racist statements, shared hate-related posts on social media, or associated with known promoters of hate and white supremacy.”
What is most notable among the campaign platforms of all three parties is that they all to address Quebec’s Bill 21 “secularism” law. In the opinion of many legal scholars and human rights experts the law is state sanctioned bigotry the main purpose of which is to suppress the rights of observant Muslims. During the Islamophobia Summit held on July 22nd the Quebec law was one of the key issues that was highlighted by many Muslim speakers, and it seems to have been deliberately ignored by the three major parties in their campaign platform for fear of offending Quebec voters, the majority of whom support this racist law.
The public statements by Justin Trudeau, Erin O'Toole and Jagmeet Singh saying they are committed to fighting hate and racism is commendable. However, the fact that they make this commitment while at the same time doing nothing to oppose a law that is state sanctioned bigotry and racism, which violates the Charter guaranteed human rights of racialized religious minorities in Quebec, is political hypocrisy at its worst. Any political leader who does nothing to oppose Quebec’s secularism law is complicit in the racism and human rights violations that are being perpetrated by the Quebec government, and therefore loses much credibility when they talk about opposing racism or defending human rights.
The issue of fighting racism has yet to be raised on the campaign trail despite how dominant it has been on the political and media agenda since May of last year. Therefore, it is up to the media to lead on this issue and question party leaders about their anti-racism and anti-hate credentials, and make sure that questions around these issues are raised during the English and French leaders’ debates in September.
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