Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be here to see you and my colleagues as well. I will be splitting my time with my good friend from Lac-Saint-Louis.
I want to start by acknowledging that we are gathered here on the traditional unceded lands of the Algonquin people.
I am going to keep my response to the Speech from the Throne to one specific issue: that of racism. I know there are many aspects of the throne speech that I would like to speak to, including long-term care as well as others, but I believe that the pandemic has heightened the discussion around racism and I want to focus my energies on that. I want to acknowledge the work of the Canadian parliamentary Black caucus and its advocacy, as well as the enormous number of young people who have more or less been on the streets for the last several months. I am so inspired by seeing a resurgence of the civil rights movement in our lifetime, and I want to thank them for their enormous work.
There are three aspects to racism and how to tackle it and how to, I would even dare to say, eliminate it. There are three components that I want to talk about.
First is the idea of eliminating the systemic barriers for people to achieve their truest and fullest potential.
Second is making sure that we equalize the playing field. We should have equal support and an equal starting point so that everyone can be the best that they are able to be.
Finally, it is the idea of empowering individuals to climb greater heights and get to a point of self-determination where they can control their destiny.
In Canada and in many parts of the world, this is not so simple. I know the Leader of the Opposition yesterday spoke about how his party and its first leader, Sir John A. Macdonald, founded Canada. From his perspective he may be correct, but it is a fundamentally flawed understanding of the history of this country. When we talk about, for example, the Indian Act, and how the Indian Act has disenfranchised first nations people across this country, separated them from their lands, their families, their livelihoods and their traditional ways of life, and saw them lose their language and their culture, this is systemic.
We saw the effects of residential schools, and heard a very moving statement yesterday by my good and dear friend from Winnipeg Centre about her experience with residential schools vis-Ã -vis her partner, Romeo Saganash, who is a former member of Parliament. We cannot even start to comprehend the depth of hatred that one must have had in order to develop laws of this nature.
We know about the forced relocation of Inuit and the killing of sled dogs. We know about the execution of Louis Riel. These are, again, moments in time.
One would think that the COVID pandemic is colour blind, that COVID-19 is a virus that does not see colour and does not discriminate based on one's identity. However, we know that is incorrect. We have excellent statistics from the United States and the United Kingdom, and some statistics from Canada are emerging. Public Health Ontario, for example, has said that people in the most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods had rates of getting COVID-19 three times higher than those in the least diverse neighbourhoods.
In Ottawa, 66% of those local COVID-19 patients were racialized, whereas they constitute only 54% of the population. In Toronto, for example, a staggering 83% of COVID-19 cases between May and July were racialized people, even though they only constitute 52% of the population. According to the same data, Black people have the highest share of COVID-19 cases, 21%, while, to put it into perspective, they constitute 10% of the population in Toronto, for example.
COVID-19 has demonstrated the racialized outcomes that we see in many other aspects of our systems. Let me just illustrate the many disturbing images we have seen with respect to racism in the past several months. I do not think that this House has enough time for us to go through them case by case, or through the number of outrageous things that we have seen in our social media, as well as the enormous pain that people face each and every day trying to address this.
George Floyd was the initial spark. I think we can agree that his death was a spark for all of us. He was a 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis who was killed by the police. We have seen since that time an enormous number of cases that have come forward.
We saw, with disgust, the videos of the way that Chief Allan Adam was roughed up by Canada's police service, the RCMP. He is the chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a nation that we are trying to build a nation-to-nation relationship with. It is offensive to the core.
I still do not have the heart to see the video of the way that Joyce Echaquan was treated in Joliette. I have read about it. I have read many articles about it. I still have not seen the video. The way that she was mistreated should offend every single Canadian. There are more cases.
We know that Mohamed-Aslim Zafis was a 58-year-old Muslim man who was killed at the International Muslim Organization mosque. He was a caretaker there and he was killed on September 12 by a neo-Nazi in an islamophobic attack.
Mona Wang, Ejaz Choudry and Regis Korchinski-Paquet all died during wellness checks.
We know that many incidents motivated by hate take place across the country.
Today, we are at a crossroads in the world, but we are also at a crossroads in Canada. This is the time for us to recommit and, as the Prime Minister said in the throne speech, to redouble our efforts to address the root causes of racism. It is not going to be easy and it is not going to be overnight, but it needs to be coordinated and it needs to be an all-out Canadian effort. It needs to start by acknowledging that systemic racism is there. That is not up for discussion.
It is about ensuring that our laws, for example on mandatory minimum sentences, are changed. It is about ensuring that we have an equal playing field when it comes to the criminal justice system. It is about ensuring that we continue on the path toward reconciliation, ensuring that we bring into law the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. For far too long, we have avoided these conversations, but it is important that we take bold steps today and build on the many things that we have done in the past, including the national anti-racism strategy.
That is not enough. We need to continue on this path. I hope my colleagues across the aisle will continue to work with us on this, to ensure that we are able to build a country that will work toward eliminating and empowering and equalizing matters for Canada's indigenous people, as well as Black and other racialized minorities.