The federal Liberals have released a report that hints at offering reparations to Black Canadians for “enslavement, segregation, and racially biased law.”
Titled A Roadmap for Transformative Change: Canada’s Black Justice Strategy, the report calls to “establish a committee of Black justice professionals, academics and community leaders to study options for reparations to Black people for enslavement, segregation and racially-biased laws.”
Conservative MP Jamil Jivani lambasted the report in a social media post on Monday, noting that it also recommends easier access to bail and a reduction in the number of Black offenders in prison by 30% by 2034, without considering crime severity.
“Trudeau Liberals have released a so-called “Black Justice Strategy” report recommending radical policies that will lead to more crime, drugs and chaos,” he said, “Liberals must reject these troubling recommendations and fix the justice system that Trudeau has broken.”
As per the report, “Canada must aim to reduce the overall current rate of persons incarcerated relative to the population by 30% by 2034, and given levels of overrepresentation, incarceration rates for Black and Indigenous people must be reduced by 50% of the current rate, relative to their proportion of the population, in this time.”
Report tasked by Minister of Justice
The Minister of Justice was tasked in December 2021 to develop Canada’s Black Justice Strategy to address disproportionate representation of Black people in the criminal justice system.
A nine-member external Steering Group was established in February 2023 to advise on the Strategy’s development. The Strategy focuses on five pillars: Social Determinants of Justice, Policing, Courts and Legislation, Corrections, and Parole/Re-entry/Reintegration.
In similar “equitable” fashion, a massive report was given to the Trudeau Liberals in December of last year that seeks to make legislative changes to hiring practices that would effectively ban merit-based hiring for good.
