Thank you, Mr. Chair.
By way of introduction, let me just say that I'm Robert Wright. I'm a social worker and a sociologist whose 30-year career in the field has brought me into the fields of child welfare, correctional mental health, education and a range of other fields. I have worked extensively with victims and perpetrators of violence of all forms. I want to thank the committee for having me as a witness. I hope I can bring an informed perspective to the committee.
I hail from Nova Scotia, the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq peoples. People of African descent were not so much settlers as they were settled on this territory, and we have been here for over 400 years and have still here in Nova Scotia some of the oldest and largest Black communities of Canada.
When it comes to thinking about systemic racism in policing, we have the distinction in Nova Scotia of having been the province of the inquiry into the wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall junior. We're also the province of the Supreme Court decision in the case known as R.D.S., and as the pioneer of the impact of race in cultural assessments, I am proud that Nova Scotia is the first jurisdiction in Canada to use these specialized pre-sentence reports to support the courts' arriving at more informed sentences in an effort to address in part the dramatic overrepresentation of people of African descent under correctional supervision in Canada.
I was a participant in a dialogue between members of African-Canadian communities and the Canadian Human Rights Commission several years ago. The Office of the Correctional Investigator had representatives at that meeting, and it was their presence at those meetings that prompted the OCI to make a focal point of their 2013 report a focus on diversity in corrections and the experiences of Black inmates under correctional supervision.
I do not believe I need to tell the members of this committee or Canadians viewing this proceeding that racism exists in the criminal justice system and that policing, as the doorway into that system, is in a critical location to address issues of systemic racism, overrepresentation and differential treatment of people of African descent within those systems.
In response to your questions later, no doubt I will reference recommendations that have been articulated in other reports and studies, but I want to use my time now to emphasize two or three points that I think are critical as we consider how to address the systemic racism that exists in policing and in other layers of the criminal justice system.
The first point is that any reform, any study, any solution must be led by people of African descent. In response to the challenges that we have had here recently in Nova Scotia related to police street checks—and I won't speak in great detail about the machinations that accompanied focus on the dramatic overrepresentation of Black bodies in those statistics—I will say that members of the African-Nova Scotian communities here have called for a provincial African-Nova Scotian policing strategy. It is our belief that no internal studies, no provincially led studies that do not focus and prioritize the leadership and the engagement of people of African descent will be sufficient to address the problem.
The second thing that I would point out is that in the effort to solve the problems that exist in policing, to defund the police by shifting resources to community agencies, mental health services and the like that might be better able to serve our populations, we must remember that those organizations to which we would shift those funds themselves all have records of systemic racism against people of African descent, and it would likely occur that simply the location of our systemic oppression and exclusion would be shifted, rather than that the systemic racism problem would be solved.
Finally, I would simply say that in our effort to address systemic racism in policing, it will be important that all of those organizations that have oversight over policing, from the human rights commissions to police review boards to police commissions and the like, would bring systemic racism to an end in all of those locations. It will be essential in this work.
Thank you for the time, and I look forward to engaging in the questions.