Posted: Monday, 5 May 2008

It was a hot Montreal summer day in August 2003, too hot to be indoors. A young Tunisian girl stood outside the housing complex where she lived to cool off.

The police singled her out and told her to move along. She saw no reason to move and was promptly handcuffed and ticketed.

Two weeks later in the same complex, three black males, all minors, were ticketed for sitting in front of their homes.

The Quebec Human Rights Commission ruled on these cases in January 2008 and found these to be instances of racial profiling by the police. It recommended the city put measures in place to put an end to racial profiling. It also ordered the city to pay $47,000 in damages plus interest to the four teens and their families. Mayor Gerald Tremblay says he doesn’t plan to conform to the Commission’s recommendations and both the city and police say the officers did nothing wrong.

In another case of racial profiling, high school students on a class trip to Thunder Bay visited the local police station to familiarize students with police services and the protection they are mandated to provide.

A 17 year old aboriginal student in the class was singled out by a police officer, who noticed he was wearing a t-shirt with an image of a native chief. The officer wrongly assumed the image was linked to a gang. In front of his classmates, the student was ordered to remove his t-shirt then was taken to an interrogation room without benefit of adult counsel. The t-shirt image is from a First Nation company that promotes pride and unity by using images of aboriginal leaders.

Today the world is recognizing the United Nation’s call to bring an end to racial discrimination, triggered by the massacre, forty-eight years ago of students and activists in Sharpeville, South Africa. On that day sixty-nine black demonstrators were killed and 180 wounded by armed South African police. On that day, courageous youth stood together to challenge the Pass Laws, a set of rules that relied on racial profiling to segregate, grant employment, enable mobility and ultimately sanction the oppression and exploitation of South African communities of colour.

The struggle to eliminate racial discrimination is not finished, today our challenge includes confronting racial profiling practices embedded in our communities and workplaces as governments and employers seek to implement greater surveillance and security measures.

Consider for example:

• Some union members, driving transport trucks across the Canada-U.S. border on a regular basis, have asked to be transferred within their workplaces so as not to face the ongoing sense of being under suspicion or special scrutiny as a result of their name, the colour of their skin or their religion that now comes with heightened border security measures.
• Poorly designed and overly invasive security clearance procedures now affect marine workers. These workers are required to submit to a security clearance process that threaten their privacy and Charter rights, and can put family members in jeopardy due to invasive security probes conducted by CSIS and the RCMP, who can share unproven suspicions and allegations with national security forces from other countries. With nearly 40% of one marine union’s membership having dual citizenship, this amounts to discriminatory treatment based on place of birth and not incidentally to being a racialized worker.
• Nearly 30 complaints have been registered from aerospace workers born in other countries, many who, despite being long standing naturalized citizens of Canada, faced discriminatory and humiliating treatment, such as having to wear special colour coded badges, having to be escorted around the plant by security guards; and limits being placed on the professional access and mobility within their workplaces all because of their place of birth. In one case an industry worker was told he would have to revoke his Lebanese citizenship in order to qualify for a position in his workplace.

Forty-eight years ago, activists faced down the injustices of apartheid South Africa that racially profiled, segregated and oppressed communities of colour.

Today, we remember the courage and the commitment required to work every day to eliminate racial discrimination in all its enduring forms.

Today, workers still see the pernicious face of racism on the job, in their communities and in government policies.

Recent polls show that as many as 1 in 5 workers feel their employment rights are violated due to racism.

More than a million aboriginal persons in Canada, now struggle against various forms of racism - one of the most egregious being environmental racism. One third of those living in Aboriginal communities in Canada, reported struggling with poor water quality and some communities have had to boil their water for over 10 years.

The Canadian Labour Congress accepts the challenge to eliminate racism from our workplaces; from within our unions; in our communities and when embedded in government policies.

The Congress has spoken out against the Conservative governments’ shameful withdrawal from the United Nations’ Durban II conference, which is tasked with the ongoing work of eliminating racial discrimination. Likewise the CLC disputes the integrity of the renewed security certificate regime that unjustly denies men of colour access to a fair judicial process.

The CLC challenges government policies that employ racial profiling practices in the manufacturing, marine, airlines, and telecommunications sectors, advanced under the specious guise of national security.

The Congress defends the rights of migrant workers, who are principally workers of colour who face exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous labour brokers, and employers.

With collective effort we can eliminate racial discrimination. We see change when union members work alongside aboriginal communities building new homes for those suffering from the ill-health effects of environmental racism.

We see change happening with workers acting in solidarity with (im)migrant rights groups fighting racist deportation policies of refugees and undocumented workers.

We see change when workers challenge racism within their workplaces’ and by educating each other in the pursuit of equity and justice for all.

The CLC stands in solidarity with anti-racist activists, in front of our homes, in our workplaces, each and every day as allies in the collective struggle to eliminate racism in all its forms, today and every day until the job is done.