In a June 27 news release on a report about the development of the federal government’s new “Black Justice Strategy,” the Department of Justice said that, “Anti-Black racism and systemic discrimination have their origins in Canada’s history of colonialism, slavery and segregation,” and that, “Addressing this issue is critical to building a fairer, more equal Canadian criminal justice system.” Thankfully, slavery was abolished in Canada in 1834, so unless the Department of Justice has access to a time machine, its new strategy really has nothing to do with slavery.
Notably, in addition to there being about 4,000 Black slaves in Canada from 1629 to 1834, approximately 82,000 Chinese paid Canada’s head tax from 1885 to 1923 and 21,000 Japanese-Canadians were forcibly expelled from their homes, confined and dispossessed by the federal government between 1942 and 1949. Whether the Department of Justice will therefore implement a “Chinese Justice Strategy” and a “Japanese Justice Strategy” in addition to its “Black Justice Strategy,” the news release did not say.
The authors of the external steering group that produced the report, titled “A Roadmap for Transformative Change: Canada’s Black Justice Strategy,” insist, among many other things, that the federal government “must commit to reducing by 50 per cent the current rate of Black and Indigenous people who are incarcerated, relative to their proportion of the population,” and reduce the overall incarceration rate by 30 per cent by 2034.
There are several possible reasons for reducing incarceration by 50 per cent for Black and Indigenous people versus the overall 30 per cent target. It’s possible the authors are suggesting the government should reduce crime by 30 per cent and that, based on their own rigorous analysis, the criminal activity that is least costly to prevent is disproportionately committed by Black and Indigenous people.
If that is true, and if the federal government wants to get the best bang for taxpayers’ bucks, then crime reduction efforts would disproportionately reduce crime, and therefore incarceration, among the Black and Indigenous population. But no such rigorous analysis is included in the report, nor has the current federal government ever demonstrated any desire to get the best bang for taxpayers’ bucks.
A second possible reason for the steering group’s higher targeted rate of “decarceration” among Black and Indigenous Canadians is that they are over-represented among the incarcerated population for reasons other than committing more crime. This claim is made in the report — the authors assert that they are “working within a legal system that was not developed to serve the needs of Black people and was designed to harm us” — but don’t back it up with convincing evidence. The report provides plenty of evidence of disparities, but not of systemic discrimination, and disparities do not imply discrimination (see, among his many other works, Thomas Sowell’s book, “Discrimination and Disparities“).
In addition to decarcerating half of Black and Indigenous offenders relative to their proportion of the population, the steering group recommends the federal government establish: “a centralized federal department or agency responsible for championing and co-ordinating efforts to advance the interests of Black people in Canada”; a “Black justice portfolio within the Department of Justice”; and a “national institute for people of African descent” that the federal government and the provinces should commit to funding for 50 years.
According to the steering group, the federal government should also “establish a committee of Black justice professionals, academics and community leaders to study options for reparations to Black people for enslavement, segregation and racially biased laws,” work to give lower interest rates and debt forgiveness to Black articling students and early-career lawyers, increase resources “for the development and improvement of Black businesses,” categorize Black people as a “priority group” in federal employment and housing programs and so on.
The steering group’s Black justice strategy focuses on dividing society by race and delivering governmental favours to the Black population. But this is a failing strategy, as seen most evidently in the United States and documented by, in addition to Thomas Sowell, prolific Black scholars such Walter Williams and Jason Riley. As their work has shown, Blacks and other communities make the most progress when focused on building human capital through education and economic advancement instead of trying to achieve political clout. Black Americans made much greater progress before the explosion of Black elected officials, welfare programs and affirmative action in the 1960s than after it.
It is no different in Canada. Among Canadian-born men and women, those of Japanese, Chinese and Korean ancestry have significantly higher average earnings than the white population. These groups are also underrepresented among criminal offenders. Their relative success in Canadian society has nothing to do with federal programs giving them preferential treatment or with the Department of Justice having a Japanese justice strategy, Chinese justice strategy or Korean justice strategy — that much is clear. Such government favours and strategies will not help Canada’s Black population, either.
National Post
Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.