City committee approves new anti-racism strategy

The city of Ottawa’s finance and economic development committee (FEDCo) has approved the city’s first anti-racism strategy.

The five-year plan will, "proactively identify and remove systemic barriers in City policies, programs and services" and "realize its vision of racial equity," according to city staff.

The plan includes 28 recommendations and 132 actions to address seven key priorities: governance, housing, economic development, health outcomes, children and youth development, achieving racial equity in the workplace, and institutional practices.

Ottawa’s director of race, equity, inclusion, Indigenous relations and social development, Suzanne Obiorah, said the COVID-19 amplified systemic inequities at the intersection of race and social class in the city.

“We saw COVID disproportionately impact Black and racialized communities. In the past two years, we also saw the discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools across the country, we saw a series of social justice movements for Black lives, anti-Asian racism, and Islamaphobia, and what we saw was systemic racism exposed and on full display in employment, housing, food security, technology, education, access to information, access to health care, and more,” she said.

“It is race, and more specifically racism, and not class that is the strongest predictor of life outcomes.”

According to the 2016 Census, 26 per cent of Ottawa residents self-identified as racialized. The city says by 2031, more than one in three Ottawa residents will be racialized.

“Here lies great opportunity,” Obiorah said. “For our city to reach its full potential, all individuals, regardless of race, must have equal rights and equitable opportunities to thrive and prosper. The strategy being proposed today seeks to accomplish just that.”

City manager Steve Kanellakos told FEDCo Tuesday morning that a lot of work went into the strategy.

“As a municipality, the city of Ottawa has a prominent role in challenging racism and our anti-racism strategy is a critical piece of this work that will help us move towards this goal,” he said.

“The strategy introduces intersectional, trauma-focused and systems-wide approach to anti-racism that will be integrated into all of our business plans. It will inform how the city develops policy, how we make decisions, how we allocate resources, how we engage the community, how we communicate to the people of Ottawa, how we evaluate our programs, how we receive and resolve complaints, how we monitor and report on our progress and how we measure outcomes of the strategy. We are completely committed to this.”

Kanellakos said engagement with city staff brought up “things we don’t like to hear”; including staff saying they’ve experienced racism in the workplace and that they feel the burden of addressing racism when it happens.

“It’s unfortunate that we have to hear these things, but it’s fortunate that we’re taking steps to address them,” Kanellakos said.

Rideau-Rockcliffe Coun. Rawlson King, Ottawa’s first Black city councillor and council’s liaison on anti-racism, says the city’s anti-racism secretariat was born out of an incident in 2019, when someone spray painted racist messages on the garage door of a Black family.

“This act of hate and racial discrimination was shocking and devastating,” King told the committee. “It was this pivotal moment that led to the community’s proposal for the creation of an anti-racism secretariat in the city and its approval by city council.”

Addressing the mayor and committee, King said the time to act against racism in Ottawa is now.

“It (the strategy) is the right thing, at the right time. It speaks to the hopes of our city,” he said.

“This is not just the duty of Black, Indigenous and racialized people. It is the shared responsibility of everyone. We need all hands on deck to address these deeply-entrenched systemic barriers imposed against many by structural, institutional power.”

Speaking on CTV News at Six, King said this new strategy is more than just talk.

"Over the last three years, the community came together, worked hard and created not just a document with words, it's a call to action to all people of Ottawa to really work together to understand systemic barries that Indigenous, Black and other racialized communities face," he said, "and to actually address those challenges with a strategy that outlines multiple recommendations and multiple actions so that we can actually see real change in the city in areas such as economic development and employment equity, as an example."

The city says phase one would start next year and run until 2025, with a focus on building internal capacity and awareness, collecting race-disaggregated data, continuing engagement and relationship building and implementing recommendations and actions from the strategy.

Phase two would run from 2025 to 2028, and would incorporate feedback, data and lessons learned from phase one.

Full city council will vote on the strategy at the June 22 meeting.