The federal government’s announcement that it will be conducting a consultation on systemic racism, as recommended by the United Nations, has generated widespread criticism.

The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson claimed the government is just trying to make Canadians “feel bad about themselves” even though “Canada … is the most tolerant country on earth”; Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert characterized the consultation as a “solution in search of a problem” promulgated by a Liberal government “even more ideologically driven [than Harper’s Conservatives]”; Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife said he doubts “systematic [sic] racism” exists in Canada, because if “you go to high schools and universities kids of all ethnic backgrounds are hanging around with each other.”

The reality of systemic racism — racial disadvantage embedded in social, political, and legal systems — in Canada has been recognized by the UN, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, international human rights organizations, official government inquiries and watchdogs, the Supreme Court, and research and policy institutes.

Canada has a wide and enduring racial wage gap: Indigenous people and other people of colour earn 30 per cent less than white workers, according to data from the latest census. And as Oxfam and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives point out in a recent report, the fact that “the wage gap actually increases for Aboriginal, racialized, and immigrant women with university degrees … demonstrates the limits of education as a tool to address the discriminatory distribution of wages and employment.”

The child poverty rate in Indigenous communities is 51 per cent: four times higher than the poverty rate for white children. Over two years ago, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government has been discriminating against Indigenous kids living on reserves, by providing them with 22 per cent less funding for services per capita than other children in Canada. In February, the Tribunal issued its fourth non-compliance order against the government, finding that it was still failing to fund Indigenous child services equitably.

Following a visit to Canada in 2016, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent expressed “deep concern about the human rights situation of African Canadians … Despite Canada’s reputation for promoting multiculturalism … many people of African descent continue to live in poverty and poor health … and are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.”

Last year, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination observed that “racial profiling by [Canadian] police, security agencies, and border agents continues on a daily basis, with a harmful impact on Indigenous peoples, ethnic minority Muslims, African-Canadians, and other ethnic minority groups.”

Canadian data on carding, police killings, and incarceration rates reveal levels of racial disparity that are similar to, or even greater than, those in the United States.

In 1999, the Supreme Court acknowledged that “the drastic overrepresentation of aboriginal peoples within the Canadian prison population … cries out for recognition of the magnitude and gravity of the problem.” Almost two decades later, the problem has only compounded in gravity and magnitude.

Over the last 15 years, the number of Indigenous people imprisoned in federal institutions has increased by 50 per cent, and the number of Black people by 90 per cent — while white incarceration declined by 3 per cent.

A 2014 study by lawyer James Scott found that Indigenous defendants in Saskatchewan received sentences up to 10 times longer than non-Indigenous defendants for the same category of crime. And a 2017 analysis by the Toronto Star discovered that Black people are grossly overrepresented in arrests for marijuana possession in Toronto — even though white people use and sell drugs at higher rates.

Racial bias exists “at all levels of [Canada’s criminal justice] system,” the UN Working Group on People of African Descent concluded, “from racial profiling … to imposition of pretrial incarceration and disparities in sentencing.”

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But, despite all the copious (and easily accessible) documentation of systemic racism in Canada, commentators continue to deny or minimize its existence. Racism denialists are like flat-earthists — who insist, against all the empirical evidence, that the Earth cannot possibly be round because it appears flat from their personal vantage point.

Unlike flat-earthism today, however, racism denialism continues to be pervasive in Canadian media — propagating a perspective that is dangerously dissociated from reality.

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst.

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