The election of Kamala Harris as vice-president of the United States will inspire more young Black women in Canada to engage in politics and run for office, says Velma Morgan, a Black Canadian activist based in Toronto.
Harris’s father was born in Jamaica, her mother in India. She is the first woman and the first Black or South Asian person elected to the vice-presidency.
Through Morgan’s work as the chair of Operation Black Vote, a not-for-profit, multi-partisan organization that aims to get more Black people elected at all levels of government, she supported Annamie Paul in her bid for the Green party leadership.
“The combination of those two (Harris and Paul), young girls are seeing themselves,” Morgan said in an interview.
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“Representation does matter,” she said. “You can’t be what you don’t see.”
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who became the first person of colour in Canada’s history to run for prime minister during the 2019 election, said Harris’s election will encourage a future generation of Canadian women to get involved and run in elections.
4:37 A Montrealer reflects on her high school friendship with Kamala Harris
A Montrealer reflects on her high school friendship with Kamala Harris
“Each person who breaks a barrier inspires more people,” he said in an interview.
“We’re only here today because of the people who broke barriers before us.”
Singh said he was happy about — and proud of — the positive impact he had on young people of colour in Canada during the election campaign last year.
“Young kids would come up to me and literally tell me, ‘Thank you. Seeing you running for prime minister makes me feel like I could do anything,”’ he said.
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Liberal MP Greg Fergus, who is chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, said there is a need to elect more Black people to the House of Commons.
“I remember when there was only one Black MP in the House. And then we went to two, and then we stayed for a number of years, and then we went to five,” he said.
Fergus said there has been some progress, but the number of Black MPs do not yet represent the “democratic weight” of the Black population in Canada. According to the 2016 census, there were just under 1.2 million Black people in Canada, making up 3.5 per cent of the country’s population.
Morgan said Canada needs more Black policy-makers. Her organization facilitates training sessions and fellowships programs for young Black Canadians to encourage more of them to run in elections.
“We’re giving them the tools to participate, whatever way they want to participate, whether it’s to run, or to volunteer or to just help out,” she said. “We’ve been trying to get the word out to say, ‘You know what, we’re here, there’s not a lot of us, but we can change that by bringing a lot more people on.’ ”
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NDP MP Matthew Green, a Black person representing the riding of Hamilton Centre, remembers in 2008 when he gathered with his community to celebrate the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States.
1:44 Edmonton women reflect on impact of Kamala Harris’ historic win
Edmonton women reflect on impact of Kamala Harris’ historic win
But he said the goal shouldn’t only be to achieve representation and reflect the diversity of the population. It should also be to achieve inclusion and equity.
“Having diverse people, women elected, for me personally, is only important if their legacy is dismantling the barriers that they faced to get there,” he said.
He said people have traditionally been privileged in Canada by race, gender and economics.
“(The system is) disproportionately, advantaging white men ? that still remains a fact,” he said.
“As a city councillor, the first elected person of African-Canadian descent in my city’s history, I was still racially profiled by police in my own community.”
He said Harris _ a former district attorney in San Francisco and then attorney general of California _ was part of a system that also incarcerated and disenfranchised Black and Latino communities and low-income people throughout her career. What really matters, he added, is whether she will be able to help marginalized people break barriers.
Former MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes, who left the Liberal caucus several months before the 2019 election to sit as an Independent, said that claiming “diversity is our strength,” as the Liberals often do, is misleading.
3:35 U.S. election: Kamala Harris’ ancestral village, uncle in India celebrates VP win
U.S. election: Kamala Harris’ ancestral village, uncle in India celebrates VP win
“Having people of different colours and different races or ideas within your systems or organizations does not mean that you’re going to build strength if those people feel excluded,” Caesar-Chavannes said in an interview Friday.
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She said collective strength comes when Canadians make spaces inclusive, so racialized people can voice their ideas and feel like they belong.
“That for sure creates a system that is more fair and more just,” she said.
Caesar-Chavannes, expected to detail her disillusionment with the Liberal brand of politics in her upcoming book, “Can You Hear Me Now?” to be published in February, said she’s not optimistic.
“If we never address the root cause, and we keep putting Band-Aids on a situation, it’s not going to get better,” she said.
Singh said it’s sometimes hard to understand that Canada has systems that are designed to exclude people.
“We look at the way the criminal justice system works, we look at the way policing works, and realize that there are systems in place that have to be changed because, right now, they’re designed to discriminate,” he said.
Some of these systems have to be changed and some have to be dismantled, he said. But he said he believes there’s enough appetite in Canada for a person of colour to be elected prime minister.
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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14, 2020
FREDERICTON – A look at Blaine Higgs, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick.
Born: March 1, 1954.
Early years: The son of a customs officer, he grew up in Forest City, N.B., near the Canada-U.S. border.
Education: Graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1977.
Family: Married his high-school sweetheart, Marcia, and settled in Saint John, N.B., where they had four daughters: Lindsey, Laura, Sarah and Rachel.
Before politics: Hired by Irving Oil a week after he graduated from university and was eventually promoted to director of distribution. Worked for 33 years at the company.
Politics: Elected to the legislature in 2010 and later served as finance minister under former Progressive Conservative Premier David Alward. Elected Tory leader in 2016 and has been premier since 2018.
Quote: “I’ve always felt parents should play the main role in raising children. No one is denying gender diversity is real. But we need to figure out how to manage it.” — Blaine Higgs in a year-end interview in 2023, explaining changes to school policies about gender identity.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
GATINEAU, Que. – Treasury Board President Anita Anand will take on the additional role of transport minister this afternoon, after Pablo Rodriguez resigned from cabinet to run for the Quebec Liberal leadership.
A government source who was not authorized to speak publicly says Anand will be sworn in at a small ceremony at Rideau Hall.
Public Services and Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos will become the government’s new Quebec lieutenant, but he is not expected to be at the ceremony because that is not an official role in cabinet.
Rodriguez announced this morning that he’s leaving cabinet and the federal Liberal caucus and will sit as an Independent member of Parliament until January.
That’s when the Quebec Liberal leadership race is set to officially begin.
Rodriguez says sitting as an Independent will allow him to focus on his own vision, but he plans to vote with the Liberals on a non-confidence motion next week.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs has called an election for Oct. 21, signalling the beginning of a 33-day campaign expected to focus on pocketbook issues and the government’s provocative approach to gender identity policies.
The 70-year-old Progressive Conservative leader, who is seeking a third term in office, has attracted national attention by requiring teachers to get parental consent before they can use the preferred names and pronouns of young students.
More recently, however, the former Irving Oil executive has tried to win over inflation-weary voters by promising to lower the provincial harmonized sales tax by two percentage points to 13 per cent if re-elected.
At dissolution, the Conservatives held 25 seats in the 49-seat legislature. The Liberals held 16 seats, the Greens had three and there was one Independent and four vacancies.
J.P. Lewis, a political science professor at the University of New Brunswick, said the top three issues facing New Brunswickers are affordability, health care and education.
“Across many jurisdictions, affordability is the top concern — cost of living, housing prices, things like that,” he said.
Richard Saillant, an economist and former vice-president of Université de Moncton, said the Tories’ pledge to lower the HST represents a costly promise.
“I don’t think there’s that much room for that,” he said. “I’m not entirely clear that they can do so without producing a greater deficit.” Saillant also pointed to mounting pressures to invest more in health care, education and housing, all of which are facing increasing demands from a growing population.
Higgs’s main rivals are Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Party Leader David Coon. Both are focusing on economic and social issues.
Holt has promised to impose a rent cap and roll out a subsidized school food program. The Liberals also want to open at least 30 community health clinics over the next four years.
Coon has said a Green government would create an “electricity support program,” which would give families earning less than $70,000 annually about $25 per month to offset “unprecedented” rate increases.
Higgs first came to power in 2018, when the Tories formed the province’s first minority government in 100 years. In 2020, he called a snap election — the first province to go to the polls after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and won a majority.
Since then, several well-known cabinet ministers and caucus members have stepped down after clashing with Higgs, some of them citing what they described as an authoritarian leadership style and a focus on policies that represent a hard shift to the right side of the political spectrum.
Lewis said the Progressive Conservatives are in the “midst of reinvention.”
“It appears he’s shaping the party now, really in the mould of his world views,” Lewis said. “Even though (Progressive Conservatives) have been down in the polls, I still think that they’re very competitive.”
Meanwhile, the legislature remained divided along linguistic lines. The Tories dominate in English-speaking ridings in central and southern parts of the province, while the Liberals held most French-speaking ridings in the north.
The drama within the party began in October 2022 when the province’s outspoken education minister, Dominic Cardy, resigned from cabinet, saying he could no longer tolerate the premier’s leadership style. In his resignation letter, Cardy cited controversial plans to reform French-language education. The government eventually stepped back those plans.
A series of resignations followed last year when the Higgs government announced changes to Policy 713, which now requires students under 16 who are exploring their gender identity to get their parents’ consent before teachers can use their preferred first names or pronouns — a reversal of the previous practice.
When several Tory lawmakers voted with the opposition to call for an external review of the change, Higgs dropped dissenters from his cabinet. And a bid by some party members to trigger a leadership review went nowhere.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
