Good morning. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present before this panel.
This submission has been prepared for the purpose of communicating the African Canadian Legal Clinic's interest in supporting the Government of Canada's decision to reinstate and update the court challenges program.
The ACLC is active in the area of constitutional equality and strongly supports the reintroduction and modernization of the court challenges program as a critical means to enhance access to justice for the African Canadian and other racialized communities. Access to justice is a critically important value to African Canadians as a historically marginalized community.
Along with indigenous peoples and European settlers from France and England, African descendants are a founding people of Canada. African descendants have always had a meaningful presence in Canada, from the early 15th century up to Confederation and into the present.
After 206 years of legalized enslavement of Africans in what is now Canada, slavery was abolished, and African Canadians had to contend with slavery's afterlife by being forced to face legal and de facto segregation in housing, schooling, and employment, and exclusion from public places such as theatres and restaurants. These racist practices were reinforced by a justice system that often served to keep African Canadians in their place.
The black experience continues to be one of extreme marginalization and disadvantage: restricted access to housing; discriminatory victimization by education and child welfare systems; social criminalization; high levels of unemployment; disproportionate and alarming rates of poverty; and near total exclusion and chronic devaluing of African Canadians in all areas of Canadian social, economic, political, and cultural life.
After 12 years of the Harper government, we have only seen these conditions worsen for blacks in Canada, as publicly funded support for precedent-setting challenges of laws, policies, and practices that facilitate and deepen black marginalization almost entirely evaporated.