OTTAWA—Even before images of Canada’s 23rd prime minister in brown- and blackface ricocheted through the national media and around the world, race and racism loomed over the federal election campaign.

If only we weren’t missing the big picture.

That’s how Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, perceives the national discussion when he surveys the past few weeks in Canadian politics: “isolated incidents” where racism flares up as an issue, but no overarching concern with what to actually do about it.

“Race is increasingly emerging as a feature in this election,” Owusu-Bempah told the Star by phone on Thursday, just before he went off to teach a seminar on racism in Toronto.

“Unfortunately, it’s doing so in isolated incidents… and not in the context of a discussion of how race influences life outcomes for Canadians, and how the leaders of the various political parties would address the issue of racism in Canada,” he said.

Frances Henry, a retired anthropology professor from York University who has written extensively on the politics of race and racism in Canada, agreed that discussions of race have caught the media’s attention to a degree that she can’t recall seeing before — especially in the wake of the political bombshell surrounding Trudeau in brown- and blackface.

It is the first election featuring the People’s party, a right-wing populist movement started by Maxime Bernier after he narrowly lost the Conservative leadership. He is now denouncing what he calls Canada’s “cult of diversity” and pledges to dramatically restrict the number of immigrants admitted each year.

In Quebec, federal party leaders have been repeatedly asked about a provincial law that bars religious minorities from working as teachers, Crown lawyers or other roles in the public service, if they wear symbols of their faith like turbans or hijabs.

And Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP, is the first person who isn’t white to lead a major federal party — a position he has used as a platform to denounce Quebec’s religious symbols law as “state discrimination,” even if he, like each of his opponents, has stopped short of promising to join a court challenge that is underway to protect minority rights in the province.

In the wake of the revelations that Trudeau had caricatured brown and Black people on at least three occasions, Singh spoke of his own experience with fighting bullies who taunted him for his brown skin and turban while growing up in Windsor, Ont.

Speaking during a campaign stop at a restaurant in Hamilton Thursday, the NDP leader said Trudeau’s actions call his character into question, but that he also wants to focus on how images of Canada’s prime minister in racist costumes could “give more oxygen” to hateful groups and recall the pain of racism for Canadians who aren’t white.

“That’s why it’s so important for us to think about what people might be going through right now,” Singh said.

“We want to build a society where people are not judged or treated unfairly because of the colour of their skin or their identity.”

Others echoed that sentiment Thursday, as Trudeau repeated his earlier apologies and asked Canadians of all origins to forgive him for his “terrible mistakes” of the past.

In a public statement, the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians — an umbrella group of agencies and individuals in Toronto — said Canadians’ focus at this point of the campaign shouldn’t be about whether the Liberal leader is racist, it should be on racism writ large in Canadian society.

Statistics Canada, for instance, has shown hate crimes reported to police jumped 39 per cent from 2014 to 2018, while a $92-million national inquiry reported this year that discriminatory attitudes and policies continue to contribute to disproportionately high rates of homicides and disappearances amongst Indigenous women and girls.

“We should use this as an opportunity to learn, reflect and change instead of using it for mudslinging for political gains,” the council’s statement read.

Ellen Berrey, also a sociologist at the University of Toronto who studies race in the workplace, said there is a difference between racist acts that come out of “humour and play” and those that come from hate, but that’s no reason to ignore things like the use of blackface at a party — quite the opposite.

“Intentions matter,” she said, but “if we’re going to judge based on intention, we’re not going to get very far” in addressing structural racism.

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Berrey said it might be difficult for Trudeau’s apology to land with Canadians. Voters here, she said, are “skeptical of apologies,” in part because Ottawa gives a lot of them without serious followup action.

For Owusu-Bempah, it’s far past time Canadians acknowledge racism is part of the country’s past and present. “There’s never been a national reckoning,” he said.

Maybe now, he hopes, there will be.

With files from Ed Tubb

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