Thank you, Dr. Fry and committee members.
My name is Avvy Go. I'm the clinic director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, formerly known as the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. We are a non-profit organization that provides free legal services to low-income members of the Chinese and southeast Asian communities in Ontario. We are also a founding member of the Colour of Poverty-Colour of Change network, which is a network of individuals and organizations working to advance racial equality and racial justice in Ontario.
I want to thank the committee for giving us an opportunity to comment on motion M-103. Our submissions and recommendations are based largely on the joint shadow report that we submitted recently to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination during its review of Canada's compliance with ICERD. Many of the recommendations we put forward have been adopted by the UN CERD committee. These recommendations are just as relevant to this study that the committee is looking at.
We see the adoption of motion M-103 as a starting point for much-needed discussions about systemic racism, Islamophobia, and other forms of racism and hate targeting communities of colour in particular. In studying racism and discrimination, it's critical for the committee to focus not only on the individual acts of hate and racism but, as mentioned, to also explore systemic racism from a socio-economic perspective so as to identify key barriers facing racialized communities.
The committee should also critically examine government laws and policies that negatively impact racialized communities, in order to make concrete recommendations for positive change. In our written submission, we provided several examples of how systemic racism and hate affect members of racialized groups. I'm going to highlight just a couple in my 10 minutes this afternoon, starting with discrimination in the labour market.
There are significant racialized and gendered wage and employment gaps in Canada. For instance, data from the 2011 national household survey show that women of colour earned 32% less than non-racialized men, and immigrant women earned 28% less than non-immigrant men. Wage gaps increase for indigenous women, women of colour, and immigrant women with university degrees. There are multiple studies that confirm employers discriminate against job applicants with Asian-sounding names, who are 33% to 37% less likely to get a callback for interviews.
As a result of the labour market discrimination, poverty in Canada has also become racialized. The last census shows that 18.7% of racialized families live in poverty as compared to only 6% of non-racialized families, yet the federal government's current national poverty reduction strategy makes little or no mention of how it would address poverty experienced by communities of colour.
Racism also exists in the immigration system. Historically, Canada has always used race as a factor to determine who gets in. The most notorious of these examples, of course, is the Chinese head tax and exclusion act. While of course today government can no longer overtly use race as a selection criterion, systemic barriers continue for racialized communities coming from the global south. This is most evident in the changes to family class immigration over the last two decades, including the recently imposed annual cap of 10,000 for applicants sponsoring parents and grandparents, and the significantly stricter minimum annual income requirements for the sponsors. As racialized Canadians have systemically poorer labour market outcomes, and given that the vast majority of these family class immigrants come from the global south, including China and India, these changes disproportionately impede reunification of racialized families.
To combat racism in all its forms, we need a commitment from all orders of government, and we need the federal government to take the leadership role in this regard. We've put forward a number of recommendations which, if adopted, will go a long way to address racism and hate. I'm going to highlight them.
The Canadian government should develop a national action plan against racism, based on full consultation with indigenous peoples, people of colour, and non-governmental organizations working to advance racial justice in Canada. I encourage the committee to look to the Ontario government's model as an example of what that action may look like.
The government should adopt a race equity lens in the development of all laws, policies, and programs to properly consider and measure the impact of its actions on racialized communities.
The government should collect and track this aggregated race-based data across all government departments, ministries, and institutions, and use this data to develop strategies for addressing racism and measuring the impact of these strategies.
The government should also centre the problem of racialization of poverty in the national poverty reduction strategy and reinstate mandatory compliance with employment equity for federal contractors.
It should also work with all the provinces and territories to introduce and enforce employment equity legislation and develop a provincial poverty reduction strategy that will focus on the racialization of poverty.
The government should amend the Criminal Code to take hate motivation into account more effectively and introduce standards for identifying and recording all hate incidents and their dispensation in the justice system.
Finally, the government should engage with the most affected communities to address the disproportionate overrepresentation of indigenous communities and African Canadians and other racialized communities in the criminal justice system.
In conclusion, I encourage and welcome the fact that we are naming the issue of racism and hate but, more importantly, we need concrete action to end discrimination.
Thank you for your time.