Black Lives Matter Toronto and other members of the black community say they’re cautiously optimistic about the city’s new draft anti-black racism action plan.

That action plan has 21 recommendations for the city including the creation of a black caucus at City Hall, hiring more black people for city jobs and overhauling the discipline process for the Toronto Police Service.

Mayor John Tory unveiled the draft plan Saturday at an open house attended by dozens of people, many of them long-time activists and organizers from Toronto’s various black communities.

The recommendations alone cannot solve the deep-seated problem of racist beliefs, Tory said, but he said he is confident they are an important first step for the city to take to combating systemic racism across Toronto.

“We have an alternative,” Tory told reporters. “We can just shrug our shoulders or we can say it’s really unfortunate or we can say ‘That’s not right’ and do everything we can to eradicate racism in this city.”

Among the draft recommendations is a suggestion the city “review” the decision not to delete years’ worth of carding data. Tory reiterated the city’s position that it can’t delete that data because its lawyers insist doing so would be illegal, but his position is that it should be destroyed if possible.

Other recommendations in the plan include an increased focus on education and job opportunities for young black people, particularly young black men with criminal records.

The report also calls for better training of city staff, and viewing many issues through “an anti-black racism lens.”

The report includes nine recommendations for the province that the city will push for, Tory said, including creating a black children’s aid society and removing barriers for people to apply for criminal record suspensions.

Reaction to the draft action plan ranged from enthusiastic to tepid.

“I think this is an important step for the city and the community,” said long-time community activist Nene Kwasi Kafele.

“But we’ve been down this road before. We’re cautiously optimistic, but we must be mindful of history,” he said.

Kafele said while the recommendations are encouraging, there are three areas he would like to see more focus.

First, it’s important to ensure that alongside actions to improve the outcomes for individual people in the education, employment and criminal justice systems, there needs to be a larger focus on economic development for many of Toronto’s currently struggling neighbourhoods, he said.

“We need to see large-scale economic development,” he said, “things like black banks, co-ops and other targeted investments.”

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Second, Kafele wants to see more commitments for community infrastructure, both in terms of bricks-and-mortar facilities like community centres but also in the human infrastructure and people needed to run them.

Third, Kafele said the report — which does place an emphasis on improving black leadership across the city — needs to ensure those leaders are not treated simply as consultants, but are incorporated into the roots of the strategy itself going forward.

“We need people with lived experience involved in the government structure,” he said.

The draft action plan is the result of more than 40 community meetings across the city. It also leans on 41 years worth of previous reports that have been written to address systemic anti-black racism.

“Rather than turn to the so-called experts to write another report, we turned to the community,” Tory said.

Tory said he personally attended four of the community meetings, and listened to community members describe what it feels like to be followed by store employees or stopped by police for no reason.

He said the whole process was sparked by his struggle to understand how to response to Black Lives Matter Toronto’s encampment at police headquarters last March.

That group did not participate in organizing the community meetings and consultations that went into drafting this report.

Black Lives Matter Toronto’s Ravyn Wngz said the group didn’t participate officially for fear of dominating the conversation.

“We wanted to make sure that the community was heard,” Wngz said. “These are our families (that participated), our friends.”

Wngz said she is hopeful the recommendations will bring about long-needed change, but she wants to see a greater focus on implementation.

“If these recommendations are a reflection of what hasn’t been happening all along, then that should be a really big red flag for the city,” she said.

The feedback the city receives from Saturday’s workshop will be used to create a set of final recommendations. Tory pledged to champion that final action plan at city council when it comes up for a vote in July. If the action plan passes, the city will begin working on a plan for implementing the recommendations, Tory said.

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