New Canadians come to this country for opportunity and tolerance, but are they being met by discrimination and racial profiling by paranoid authorities?
That’s what a panel of teachers, students, and activists discussed yesterday with about 30 people as part of the “Racial Profiling: In Our Communities, On Our Campus” event at Sid Smith Hall.
The event was to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
“Racial profiling is morally wrong, it is legally wrong, and more importantly it is not going to result in more effective policing and we have to hope that our security forces have more to go on than stereotypes based on a person’s race or religion,” said Kent Roach, one of yesterday’s speakers.
The three-person panel consisted of activists, students, and teachers brought together by Arij Al Chawaf, VP External of the Graduate Students’ Union.
Roach is a law professor here at U of T; Farrah Miranda is a third-year Women’s Studies student and a member of Project Threadbare, a civil rights awareness group; Diana Ralph is a professor of social work from the University of Carleton and long-time anti-discrimination activist, who works with terrorism suspects held under Canada’s “security certificate.”
“Racial profiling is the practice of law enforcement relying to any degree on race, ethnic origin or religion in selecting which individuals to subject to investigation or heightened scrutiny,” Roach told the crowd.
“Racial profiling is bad policing,” said Roach, “it is bad security work, and it is not going to make us safer.”
Roach said that the Canadian Anti-terrorism Act that went into place after 9/11 has done little more than grant law enforcement agencies sweeping powers in the hope that a wider net will catch more terror suspects.
Miranda has dealt with some of the causalities of the Anti-terrorism Act’s blunders. She explained to the crowd that in the summer of 2003 a joint RCMP and Canadian Citizenship and Immigration raid arrested 24 South Asian men under the pretense that they were part of an al Qaeda sleeper cell.
“Some of the evidence used against them was that they were living in small quarters,” said Miranda. “Well, they were living in small quarters because they were poor. They were detained because they took pictures and videos in front of the CN Tower.”
“Threadbare came together to address and make the connection between the war abroad and the anti-war movement at home, and the war against immigrants and refugees, like the Thread detainees, who were wrongfully targeted, accused, and arrested.
“Post-9/11 we’re seeing increased detention, we’re seeing increased deportation and an increased attack on immigrant communities. We’re seeing more and more immigrants trying to escape the American Patriot Act and special registration in the U.S., and they’re coming to Canada to seek asylum. What’s Canada’s response? Increased racial profiling.”
Miranda is part of a campaign called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which seeks to “prohibit city workers from inquiring into a person’s immigrant status before providing essential services. It also seeks to prohibit them from sharing status with immigration authorities, so that people without status can still have rights.
Ralph took racial profiling a step further by addressing Western fear and ignorance of Muslims post-9/11.
“Islamophobia is the next and a key issue in civil rights and we are never going to stop racial profiling till we take on this issue.”
Ralph and others claim that the certificates violate human rights and are unconstitutional.
She argues that the investigation into and the enforcement of the certificates is largely based on racial and religious profiling.
“The rights of non-status people in this country goes along with the broader argument that racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are woven into our society and by ending them it will make all our lives better.”
