Shocking, I Know

For the last three people who thought cops were all nice guys:

KINGSTON, Ont. (CP) - Results of the first study of racial profiling by police in Canada has emotions running high in Kingston, Ontario.

Kingston officers stopped over 10,000 people during the year-long study - and blacks were pulled over three times more often than whites or aboriginals.

University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley analysed the data and calls the project a good first step in dealing with police racial bias.

...

The report also found aboriginal people were 1.4 times more likely to be stopped than whites.

I'm not a reflexive cop-basher by nature, but the defenders of these cops really did look ridiculous - "Well, we stop and arrest innocent blacks because blacks are more likely to be... innocent? No, wait, I've got the line here somewhere..." But the aboriginal figure was more interesting to me. The article doesn't say whether that 1.4 factor is corrected for their smaller percentage of the population, but I truly hope it is. Otherwise, we've got a much larger problem with the first nations than I previously thought.

One of the other things this shows is the pervasiveness of racism, even in countries that never had it systematized as the US or other slave states. People use racism, like all their prejudices, as a shorthand to deal with the complexity of life. The problem is when this comes up against judicial concepts like the presumption of innocence.

A number of Conservatives have recently written about the "Myth of Canada", the idea that Canada is this multicultural utopia that has "peacekeepers", not soldiers, and derided this as Trudeau-era propaganda. They've even got press in the New York Times, proving only that the quickest way for a Canadian to get printed in the US is to pull a Zell Miller.

I personally never bought that this was a multicultural utopia, and I think our ideological preference for "peacekeeping" has probably hurt our national defense in a number of ways, but that's not to say that multiculturalism or peacekeeping are bad things, or that they're "Liberal propaganda." Multiculturalism is a very real thing in Canada, and we're better off for it. And Canada, until recently, had the distinction of being the only country to participate in every single peacekeeping mission under the UN banner. However, these facts aren't simple declarations - there's a lot of complexity hidden behind them, especially with multiculturalism. We've had to deal with right-wing xenophobes who want to shut the doors to new immigrants, and I've had more than one argument with people on my left flank who think that Canada should cut military spending even further than the paltry amounts we already spend. In fact, military spending is one area where Linda McQuaig and I disagree. (Though I don't think she advocates cuts, she does oppose spending increases.)

However, there's a flip side to Canadian multiculturalism - because it's most evident in the biggest cities, it's proportionally less in the suburbs and rural areas. Outside of, say, the five biggest cities, this is an incredibly white country, and my city-dwelling compatriots would be well to remember that.