Trudeau, O’Toole and Singh didn’t address racism during the election, they need to make it a priority in the new Parliament

By Fareed Khan

The election that a majority of Canadians did not want is over and it returned a Parliament barely different than the previous one.  Now that it is over it is time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, and New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh to get to work dealing with Canada's other pandemic, the one none of the party leaders addressed during the election campaign that has been around long before Covid19 landed on our shores, namely the pandemic of racism and hate which has been ignored for decades.  

Addressing this issue is even more urgent given that more than 800,000 Canadians voted for the People’s Party of Canada, a party that is anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and has embraced racism and white supremacists.

Many Canadians, particularly members of racialized communities, were troubled that combatting hate was barely mentioned by Trudeau, O’Toole or Singh during the campaign.  It begs the question “why not” when 60 per cent of Canadians see it as a serious problem, according to a poll released on September 3rd.

Canadians took to the streets to protest in the tens of thousands over the last year and a half calling for racial justice, for action to fight Islamophobia, and supporting justice for Indigenous people.  Yet none of the three major party leaders took this as a signal to make the fight against hate and racism one of their priorities in their campaign messaging.

However, the Liberal and NDP leaders should be credited for including proposals to fight racism in their respective policy documents while O’Tooles Conservatives did not.  In fact the Tories failed to mention the words “racism” and “Islamophobia” even once in their campaign platform.  This says volumes about how serious the Conservatives are about fighting hate and supporting calls for racial justice.  It also shows that they have a ways to go before racialized minority communities see them as a sincere partner in the fight against hate.

 

One area where all three party leaders were spectacular failures with racialized communities is around Quebec’s Bill 21 “secularism” law, a law deemed racist by human rights experts and legal scholars.  For the sake of political expediency all three leaders turned their backs on those Quebecer’s impacted by the discriminatory Quebec law which targets racialized religious minorities.  Furthermore, all three leaders need to be chastised for failing to challenge Bloc Quebecois leader Yves Francois Blanchet for his specious claim that the moderator of the English language debate had called Quebecer’s “racists” by asking a question about Bill 21.  And while Trudeau left the door open to a legal challenge to the law by the federal government, it should be noted that he made the same promise in the 2019 election but did nothing to follow up on it afterwards. 

As the only racialized leader of a major party Singh also needs to answer for his failure to take a strong and principled stand against Bill 21, and support of the rights of Sikhs, Muslims and Jews in Quebec.  One would expect him to be at the forefront of opposition to the Quebec law instead of caving in to Quebec’s Francophone ethno-nationalists.  The fact that he is not is deeply disappointing and contradicts his claims that the NDP would be there for the people that needed them, and that he is committed to the cause of anti-racism.

These actions demonstrate the hypocrisy of all three men for claiming to be defenders of human rights in their campaign platforms, but refusing to stand up for the human rights of Quebec’s minority religious communities against an unjust Quebec law that promotes government sanctioned racism.  In so doing they sent the message that in Canada not all minority communities are worthy of human rights, or having them defended by our national political leaders. 

As soon as Parliament reconvenes Trudeau, O’Toole and Singh must put the fight against hate into high gear and help push back this pandemic which is deeply affecting the lives of millions of Canadians.  They also need to rethink their positions on Bill 21 if they want to have any credibility as defenders of human rights.  If they fail to do this in the new Parliamentary session the anger of Canadians who have marched in the streets over the last year and a half will be expressed loudly and politically.  Anti-racism activists in particular will be watching what they do closely, and will hold all of them accountable for their failure to confront this deeply rooted and ugly disease which needs a forceful national effort led by principled political leaders to counter it.

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