We talked with Marcia Brown who is a plaintiff in a multi-million dollar law suit against the Government of Canada, which neglected its fiduciary duty to first-nations communities by transferring child welfare to the province. The law suit is brought forward by survivors of the “sixties scoop,” including Marcia herself. Thousands of first-nations children were taken from their parents, removed from their communities and forced into the foster care system where they were assimulated into non-native families. This resulted in “identity genocide” and long-standing difficulties for the individuals and for indigenous communities. Marcia talked about her own traumatic experiences within the foster care system and later as an adopted child in a white family. She regrets the little time she spent with her grandmother who taught her all she now knows about medicine and her families heritage. She brought forth this legal case when she realized that there were thousands like her. The legal case will set an important precedent along with providing closure for many families still in search of lost relatives. The hearing is taking place in court room 6 at 361 University Avenue between April 26-30. Please try and come out and show your support!
We also talked about Kimberley Rogers- a woman who was nine months pregnant, was put under house arrest for supposedly defrauding the welfare system (when she took student loans to return to school to improve her life and get out of poverty) and who died in her non-air conditioned apartment in Sudberry Ontario on a sweltering August day while on house arrest. This is a glaring example of poor bashing and the attacks on our poor and working classes while we ride out this recession, while there are bail-outs for banks and corporations. The poor are once again being taxed to support the upper classes with the recent announcement by the Provincial government to slash the special diet allowance for people on Ontario Works and ODSP. You can hear about the impact this will have on the affected communities as the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty gathered testimonials from people on OW and ODSP. These are in three parts and can be found here:
· Part 2/3 (9 mins) which we partially played on the show, featuring Dr. Roland Wong
The footage from the rally can be found here
We also talked about the recent pardon granted to Canada’s Rosa Parks- Viola Desmond. Viola Desmond, an African Canadian woman, was forcibly removed from a movie theatre on November 8, 1946 for sitting in the whites-only section of the Roseland Theatre, a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Her activism had a lasting impact on the African-Canadian community and led another African-Canadian woman, Carrie Best (who herself and her son) had had a similar experience to found a newspaper "The Clarion" (the first African Canadian-owned and published newspaper in Nova Scotia) to publicise Desmond's story and the issue of racism. Desmond was granted a free pardon by the lieutenant-governor of the province of Nova Scotia and an apology from its premier for the institutional racism she had suffered (this was intended as an apology for her family and for all African-Canadians). Her sister and remaining family were present for the historic event- an apology that came almost 63 years later. We talked both about the relative obscurity of Viola Desmond compared to her counterpart in the States (Rosa Parks) and also about the tendency in some mainstream media outlets to pronounce the apology as somehow indicative of an end to institutional and systemic racism. The apology and free pardon came about a month and a half after a similar apology for the destruction of Africville in 1967.
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