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It came, it must be said, with no little anticipation. He is the boss now, after all, and this is, for the moment, his defining issue. So when Police Chief Mark Saunders walked to the podium Wednesday, at a summit on black issues in Toronto, you could hear a quiet hum of expectation in the air.

It didn’t last long.

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Chief Saunders, new to the job and already under fire, pleased precisely no one Wednesday when he refused, once again, to denounce the controversial practice of carding when offered the chance.

“It wasn’t that what we were doing was catastrophic,” he said about carding after the event. “It’s that there was room for improvement. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re in the process of improving how we do our job.”

In his brief address, to the Second African Canadian Summit, held at the headquarters of the Ontario Federation of Labour, Saunders avoided the word “carding” entirely.

Instead, he spoke of training and conversations and community leadership. In remarks that lasted less than three minutes, he acknowledged that “African Canadians have a completely different experience living here in Canada.” He called the Toronto Police Service an “inclusive” service. “That means that we have to treat everybody fairly,” he said.