The Last Word on Black History Month in Canada - Fifty Years of Open Arms and Opportunity

Crunching the Numbers on half a century of extraordinary black population Growth in Canada

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

By

Shannon B Douglas

February is RRSP and peak financial planning season in my world. I spend the month chasing deadlines, crunching numbers and taking opportunities to review relationships. This year I realized I have been working with some families for nearly twenty years and I’m deeply fortunate in my career to know people better than their doctors do. I’m feeling grateful for these long friendships as I reflect on how much life, and the world changes in just a couple decades at this time of year.

One of my clients, Greg, now in his eighties, is a retired military officer who grew up in Halifax and we were talking about my controversial school-board run this past year and my concerns about how Critical Race Theory and widely held beliefs about historic racial oppression have completely taken over public schools. As a grandfather of many now, and soon to be a great-grandfather, he shares my concerns.

Halifax once had the largest black population in Canada and Greg recounted some of his memories of overt racism in the town where he grew up and where he spent some of his years serving in the military. The roots of the black Community in Nova Scotia are deep and storied, stretching back centuries and Greg is grateful that so much has improved for blacks in Canada since his youth, especially through the years while his children went to public schools in Canada.

I grew up with similar experience to Greg’s children, myself the son of a mining engineer who moved his family for work many times while we were young. I am fortunate, though I didn’t always think so, to have lived all over Canada and even abroad while growing up. More so than many, I believe I have a broad view, a respect and a deeply felt sense of the incredible scope of Canadian Culture. In the 70’s we lived as anglophones in Sept Isles, Quebec during the FLQ crisis; we lived in Richmond, BC during the waves of Hong Kong and Pacific Rim migrations, and in the early eighties we lived in Brampton when the children of Vietnamese boat people were welcomed into our churches, schools and our Boy Scout and Girl Guide troops in Peel.

My middle-school classes in Brampton were mixes of Portuguese, Asian, Jamaican and white kids, with many, if not most, of my classmates being first-generation born Canadians or immigrants. Fully 10% of my classes in those years were kids from Jamaican families when in 1981, only 1 in 100 Canadians was black.¹ As we observe the last days of Black History Month in Canada, I thought I’d get curious about more than my lived experience of growing up as just one of the colored threads in the cultural and racial tapestry that is my country; and I’d use some of my career-honed number-crunching skills to find out more about black Canada. It surprised me, especially in the face of the narrative of oppression that accompanies present education for kids in Ontario that sadly is so closely tied to Black History Month.

It is notable here to observe the following: More than thirty-five states in the US have now passed laws against the practices of teaching ideas to children suggesting one race should resent another race in schools; or to teach that the US is a systemically racist country; or that it is founded on white supremacy; or more egregiously, to teach that some children benefit from unearned white privilege while others fight insurmountable invisible obstacles of pervasive racism. These laws include bans on teaching things like ancestral guilt and on teaching that whites today are responsible for historic injustice. Thirty-five states passing laws like this means that the concerns are bipartisan. I share this in the context of my conversation with my long-time friend, (a conservative) who like me (up until recently a liberal) has experienced the breadth of Canada and has a sense of our shared community across the country.

These victimology views, rooted in Critical Race Theory, are exceptionally distorted interpretations of our history in Canada. It's a thankless view of the world we live in because the nature of our country is that of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic tapestry shaped by waves of immigration from all over the world, not just over decades, but over centuries.

I wanted to share some facts available without prejudice from Stats Canada about the history of the black Population in our country²: It clearly shows that we live in a place of opportunity for all people that is exceptional in the world and that far from being a racist white supremacist country, we live in a welcoming place of opportunity that has openly invited, arguably even placed emphasis on immigration from predominantly black countries over decades - which seems like a strange thing to do for a white supremacist country.

These facts do not deny that racism exists or has existed in the past but if one views these statistics with any measure of objectivity, they tell a very different story about the society we live in than does a radical oppression doctrine imported from the US with its 13.5% black population and a history of chattel slavery. It raises serious questions about grievance claims put forward by activists (both Black and White) promoting Critical Race Theory in our schools system in Canada.

What I found is that the story of blacks in Canada over the last half-century is a triumph of acceptance and welcoming. I know some will be outraged by this statement of fact because it fails to fit within their political beliefs and agendas but please consider these population statistics reported by the government of Canada:

In 1971, the year I was born, one in five-hundred people, or 0.2% of people in Canada was Black. There were only about 35,000 black people in all of Canada at the time, one would assume, a significant portion of those were in Halifax and the surrounding area because of the long history there.

By 1981, the year I was in fifth grade in Brampton, going to schools with the children of a rapidly growing Jamaican diaspora, one in a hundred people, or 1.0% of people in Canada were black. This was a five-times increase in a single decade due almost entirely to welcoming immigration policies. This number doubled again by the early-mid-nineties and has since more than doubled AGAIN, mostly due to immigration from the Caribbean and from Africa.

Today, as we hear the oppression claims of activist parent groups talking about the historic oppression of blacks in Canada, advocating for special accommodations for black children to compensate for historic injustices which they claim blacks have experienced at the hands of “White Supremacists” in Canada, and the questionable claims of unequal outcomes in all facets of life due to systemic racism, very close to 1 in 25 people in Canada are black.³

In absolute numbers, in 1971, there were 35,000 black people in Canada and we see that today there are over one million. If one simply looked at Ottawa, the city I call my home now, with an even one million people living here, and if we assumed that blacks are equally represented here in Ottawa at 4.3% of the population, one could say that there are more Black people in the city of Ottawa today than in ALL of Canada fifty years ago.

Now some will argue for their belief in systemic racism and claim that whites represent a disproportionate percentage of positions of power and receive a disproportionate share of income in Canada.

This claim falls on it's face when adjusted for age and for what I’ll call the immigration prosperity curve. The median age of blacks in Canada is 29.6 years (2016 stats) while the median age of Canadians of all races at large is 40.7 years. When adjusted for age, the discrepancies in income and positions of power virtually disappears.

It also collapses under the simple examination of what families go through when arriving in a welcoming country like Canada - the immigration prosperity curve. Regardless of what wave of immigration we can trace our journeys here to, because all of us at some point trace our lineages to an immigration or migration, we recognize that most of us came here with little or nothing to start a new life. We see this when we look at waves like those of the Vietnamese boat people who arrived in early eighties; at the new waves of Syrian refugees arriving in the last five years, or to the waves of immigration to which my father’s family belonged, who arrived in Saskatchewan in the dirty thirties during the dust-bowl years after the economic collapse 1929 during the great depression. They fled Russia with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, and came to Canada after having spent almost five years in a refugee camp in Germany because they were fleeing genocidal communism. It takes a while for a people to establish themselves in a new country starting from nothing. Sometimes, it takes a couple of generations and I’ve often heard people say it takes three generations to go from short-sleeves (working class or labour) to shirt-sleeves (white-collar or professional roles).

Yet we have set aside special accommodation and status for blacks under the dogmas of Critical Race Theory and we disregard the nature of Canada and what it takes to find footing here. We are especially indulgent of school-aged children in this regard. Because of claims of historic and systemic oppression by so-called white-supremacist Canada, if such a thing ever existed at all, we are indoctrinating our children into the worst kind of worldview. One similar to the that which so many people fled in countries abroad to come here. It is deeply sad and unjust that social justice activists also claim we are not teaching the real history in Canada in schools because of white supremacy.

Perpetuating these beliefs, especially in Canada, that has obviously and indisputably been an inviting and welcoming place of black flourishing in the last half century, is not fighting systemic abuses against black children, it IS systemic injustice perpetrated against black children. These disempowering views of woundology and victimization are destructive to children. They teach that the deck is stacked against black people, they foster resentment, contempt and animosity, not just for the country we live in but for the society and system of opportunity that is available to everyone who lives here.

What the history of black Canada tells me, and anyone with the willingness to look at the statistics, is that Canada offers extraordinary opportunity, inviting many hundreds of thousands of black immigrants here over the last fifty years extending to black immigrants the same chance as to people of every other wave of immigrants who have landed upon our shores, giving them the same chance to create a safer more abundant life for themselves and their families than the place they left.

My friend Greg, whose race is and should be inconsequential to any discussion about opportunity in Canada, is a man of simple tastes and humble views. I borrow one of his expressions here because sometimes a quip is the best closer: “There are sadly always people who want to sit on a pile of gold looking for treasure.” My father, the first of his family to get a university degree, son of refugee immigrants, a gold miner, knew this too.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read Jedi Mind Tricks, Hypnosis, and the Koans of Transgender Indoctrination

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1. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/dq221026b-eng.htm

2. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/11-008-x/2003004/article/6802-eng.pdf?st=J_k2c607

3. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-657-x/89-657-x2019002-eng.htm