Election in Canada: Campaigners “Frustrated” that Party Leaders Avoid Racism Problem – National

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The vast majority of Canadians are against racism and recognize it as a problem in Canada, although about two-thirds of all non-white Canadians say they have experienced it themselves, according to a new poll.

These results come just ahead of the 2021 federal election – an election with platforms that some advocates don’t have enough pressure against anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism as well as a commitment to police reform in Canada.

Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, said the lack of attention to these issues in terms of party policies and platforms was not only “extremely frustrating” but “revealing” of party values.

Read more: 1 in 2 people of color have experienced online racism in Canada, survey finds

Although most of the major federal parties have included racism and discrimination in several sections of their platform, outlining a call to action to tackle racial issues, Hudson says that what they currently don’t have is not enough or substantial.

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The NDP platform included a pledge to ‘fight racism’ and ban carding, while the Liberals said more support for an action plan to tackle systemic racism, while the Green Party was noted as having the only platform that had specific promises to downsize police organizations like the RCMP.

The Tories have not included any pledges to tackle systemic or anti-black racism in their platform – with the party leader even pledging to hire more police officers amid calls from advocates for funding and reform of police organizations Across the country.

That’s a point Freed Khan of the Canadians United Against Hate made in an interview with The Canadian Press on Saturday.

Khan, who also pointed to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s lack of discussion of racism during their election campaign, told reporters it made him wonder how much they are taking the problem seriously.

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On the one platform where it would have the most impact in an election, they haven’t talked about it, Khan said.

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So what that says to me and a lot of people activists is maybe what they’ve said over the last year is just a lot of talk, and they’re not as serious about fighting hate as they said.

Hudson said she was not surprised that issues of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism were pushed out of the leadership’s campaigns and platforms.

The fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has still failed to break through political barriers in Ottawa speaks to a “crisis of democracy” in Canada, Hudson said.

Read more: “Just a lot of talk”: Activists urge party leaders to focus more on racism

She raised questions about why anti-black racism, or racism policies in general, were not a major platform feature in federal leadership agendas despite the massive BLM protests on it. last year.

How do you have a problem through which so many people take so many actions… during a pandemic, come out to protest… and that’s not one of your key things that you face ”, he said. she declared.

“What will it take for them to care?” It’s something pretty disgusting to have a system where people… put so much energy into saying that it’s a priority for us and all of them to really ignore it… or ignore it altogether. .

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Meanwhile, the poll conducted exclusively for Global News by Ipsos found that 96 percent of all Canadians say racism is a terrible thing.

Just over a quarter of Canadians say they have personally experienced racism, although that proportion skyrockets to 65% for Canadians who identify as other than white.

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Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, said there has been “radical change” on the issue of racism as a whole across Canada.

“It’s no longer about whether or not racism is a problem in this country and whether or not it takes change to deal with it,” Bricker said.

“But I still recognize, as the interviewees do, that there is a significant problem and that other people are experiencing it. The survey also revealed distinct differences by gender, age and region in the experiences of Canadians with racism.

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Younger and middle-aged Canadians were more likely to say they had experienced racism than those 55 and older, according to the survey, while men were more likely to say they had been victims of racism. racism than women.

Geographically, Canadians west of Quebec were more likely to say they have experienced racism, with around 30 percent of those affected in Ontario and the Prairie provinces and almost one in four in Colombia. -British.

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On the other hand, the majority of people in Quebec and Atlantic Canada say they have not been directly victims of racism, with 57% of people in these regions strongly agreeing that they have not. not been victims of racism.

Moreover, while more than three-quarters of Canadians in most parts of the country strongly agree that racism is a “terrible thing”, this feeling drops slightly to 67% in Quebec.

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Read more: Trudeau says question of leaders’ debate on racism in Quebec was unacceptable “and” offensive ”

According to Bricker, Canada’s change in attitude toward systemic racism comes in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement – as well as the push for Indigenous reconciliation.

The majority of the Canadian population – the strong majority of the Canadian population – believe this is wrong and that it is something that needs to be done about it, ”said Bricker.

—With files from the Canadian Press

These are some of the conclusions of an Ipsos poll carried out from September 3 to 6, 2021 on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of n = 1,500 Canadians aged 18 and over was interviewed online, via the Ipsos I-Say panel and non-panel sources. Respondents receive a nominal incentive for their participation. Quotas and weighting were used to balance demographics to ensure that the sample composition reflects that of the adult population according to census data and to provide results intended to approximate the universe of sample. The precision of Ipsos surveys that include non-probability sampling is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within 2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, if all Canadians had been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All polls and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to, coverage error and measurement error.

© 2021 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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