Here, play this quick game. Using A, B and C grades, how would you rate Ontario’s three main political party platforms for their commitment to addressing racial discrimination and marginalization?

Chances are you will come up with the same ranking as a coalition of more than a dozen agencies and individuals under the umbrella of Colour of Poverty — Colour of Change (COP-COC) did: this week, they released a non-partisan racial justice report card, and gave the NDP an A grade, the Liberals a B and the Progressive Conservatives a C.

So, no surprises there. But the report card is not about damning or feting with a single grade.

“It provides the context in each area, and the challenges facing racialized communities,” said Avvy Go, clinic director, Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and a steering committee member of COP-COC.

The groups evaluated each party platform based on their commitments, their record, and missed opportunities.

While the NDP received an A in all categories except access to justice, and the Liberals got a smattering of As and mostly Bs, the PCs got a C in all categories, which included education, jobs, health, housing, human rights, policing, poverty and newcomer settlement.

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How non-partisan is the report if it has that glaring C grade for the Conservatives?

“The PC gets a C for two reasons: first of all, for many of the policy areas, they actually do not have any position. Second, in areas where they have a position, it does not take into account the challenges faced by racialized communities. If we were partisan, we could have given the PC a F, i.e. a failing grade,” Go said.

By the same token, an A or B grade doesn’t mean that party is offering a perfect policy. “The grades are given on a relative scale. For instance, none of the parties have committed to repeal the three month waiting period for OHIP, which has a serious impact on newcomers, the majority of (whom) are racialized,” she said.

Although about 30 per cent of Ontario’s population is Indigenous and racialized, politicians haven’t been taken to task on tackling discrimination and marginalization, with the exception of Doug Ford being challenged on his plan to overturn police oversight rules. (And that was by a community organizer, not a reporter: Call it indifference, call it illiteracy, but this appears to afflict journalists and politicians alike.)

It’s one thing for parties to make promises on the party platform. It’s another to see how individual candidates align with those stated promises.

Nahnda Garlow is a journalist at Two Row Times, a weekly publication based in Ohsweken, a village on the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation Indian reserve near Brantford, Ont. She had a straightforward set of questions for all six provincial candidates in the Brantford-Brant riding: Name the six nations (none of them could); what is the Indigenous population in their constituency (no one got that) what are chief issues facing Indigenous people.

Garlow says only the NDP and Green Party candidates had strong answers to that last question. The NDP candidate mentioned inequities of access, the Green man talked about the ability of First Nations to set their own priorities. The Liberal candidate offered headache-inducing gibberish: “Reconciliation. And I’m so glad the Liberal government is doing it … And it’s so sad to hear whatever has happened but let’s put that aside because it’s good to move forward in life.”

But, yikes, the Conservative candidate embarked on a saviour mission. “I would say the real issue is pride … How can we engender that same kind of entrepreneurial … spirit in our Indigenous communities and stop holding them back?”

At the same time, in other constituencies, PC candidates with apparently bigoted views churn on unscathed.

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Merrilee Fullerton, the PC candidate for Kanata-Carleton, who was found to have Islamophobic tweets and a blog about surveilling all foreign doctors with suspicion, continues merrily, having simply shut down those accounts or pages.

Doug Ford’s London, Ont., candidate Andrew Lawton, formerly of Rebel Media, who blamed his past homophobic, anti-Muslim and misogynistic comments on mental illness has more explaining to do. In a podcast on free speech, Press Progress found Lawton suggested Jewish groups should not shut down campus debates such as “did the Holocaust actually happen?”

None of this appears to be straining their credulity.

It may appear that the lack of outrage stems from Ontarians’ indifference to racism and marginalization, but let’s hold out hope that everyone is planning to speak up where it’s heard most — at the ballot box.