Carolann Wright-Parks: Full Interview

In the full interview below, you’ll find Carolann Wright-Park’s reflections on running in her early thirties, her thoughts on Rob Ford, and shifting the stereotypes around poor people.

On how she got into the mayoral race

I was a rough around the edges community organizer. Because of my work I was well aware what all the issues were, and they were really important to me at the time.

It was an anti-poverty agenda, understanding that there is always that subtext of race that comes into that issue and how it plays out in terms of politics. I was not expecting to run. I'm an organizer, not usually a frontperson. It was purely the community who said, 'Look, we'd appreciate if you did this because it would highlight the issues that we work so hard from day to day. It would give a face to the issues of anti-poverty.' I covered a couple of bases in being a black woman and having come from a low-income background: I had been on assistance, got to school, and got a job to work my way out of it.

I had no political experience at that time (but now I understand that that doesn't matter!) and was not politically sophisticated at all, but I knew what the agenda was. I thought I would do this for the greater good, but I was nervous as hell and scared the day of the press conference. People thought, “This is a brave woman.” Not at all! I was terrified. But I am also a community organizer and I believe you do what you need to do to get a community agenda out there on the table.

On how race played a role in the campaign

The main organizers were anti-poverty organizers, but as I emerged as the face of the campaign, the black community became aware of this and got involved. The intention was to make sure there was cross-pollination—the intersection of these issues of race and class—making sure the worldviews of everybody who shared in Toronto were recognized and those voices could be heard through me in some way.

During that period there was a lot of police violence against young black men. The issue of race in Toronto was extremely volatile, particularly about policing. And, if you were a poor single mother in the system, and God forbid you were black, people thought it was okay to treat you a particular way. We had to not only address this in the campaign in a practical way, but get it on the Mayor's agenda.

As a black woman, I have a lens through which I see things, and race was really quite interesting. It wasn't really something that I was consciously talking about but I talk about anyway, you know? It annoys me when other people try to talk through my experience when they know they're not going through it. I was really clear with people: I'm gonna talk through my lens as a black woman who has experienced poverty, not someone who was talking about people's experiences, but talking about my own as an example of what was happening in the issues of poverty and race.

On being the first black woman to run for mayor

When I first announced, there was a pause because I don't think a black woman had ever ran before. A black man had been in city council in the 1800's at some point a long time ago [William Peyton Hubbard, a City of Toronto Alderman from 1894 to 1914] but I think I was the first black woman who had ever run, period. So, there was some pause, like 'is it serious?'

I began getting calls from the black community: 'Are you seriously going to do this and put yourself out there?' I think my community became nervous about it. As the campaign rolled out I think people became more comfortable. Speaking to the issue of race-relations is how you articulate and talk about race but at the same time be able to talk about those other issues. Those intersections are important and for me it was easy because I had experienced it all. I liked that campaign because it was really a people's campaign.

If you're a black person, people make the mistake of saying, “I'm not here to represent black people. I represent everybody.” But you are representing your community. I was representing a segment of my community. That's the reality of it. I never apologized for that.

On how crucial the issues of homelessness and low-income communities were

It was important to move those stereotypes around people who were poor. We could be smart. We could be articulate. The issue of homelessness was high on the radar at that particular moment of time. One of the overarching things was to get the city to pay attention to what was going on in Regent Park and other low-income communities: to campaign there, to pay attention, to listen to people's voices.

At the time, Toronto was not looking seriously at the issue of homelessness: we had people dying on the streets. At my time there was the G7 summit [the 14th, held between June 19 and 21, 1988] and they swept homeless people off the street for a couple of nights, and I think that was the turning point.

You can do this to impress people coming to Toronto to make it look like we don't have homelessness but that was an insult to the people who were enduring the day-to-day suffering. Being true and purposeful about the issue of homelessness is what the anti-poverty groups were trying to bring attention to: this is not a two-day thing, this is people's lives at risk here.

On increasing the vote

Young people growing up in Regent Park and St. Lawrence and surrounding areas in the city did not vote. They did not care and were not interested because they felt they were not cared about either. We wanted to change that optic and do some education around voting: You really need to begin to understand your civic duty and your voice.

I think people were at that particular time fed up with the dismissiveness around low-income communities and homelessness: things that were just not on the Mayor's agenda at that time. We wanted to let people know their voice counted. It counted on election night.

The voter turnout was excellent during that campaign because we spent time in communities doing things that were not traditionally done in civic campaigns. When people saw that it did have an impact, it really changed the leery in terms of how they saw the campaign. That kind of work needed to keep up in order for it to hold.

On what she would have done had she won

I never really thought about it at that time to be perfectly honest with you. We were so focused on the campaign issues. Education around homelessness and housing on the agenda. On increasing the vote. And contrary to opinion at that time, I knew what it was. I remember somebody from my own community saying, ‘Don't believe the hype,' and I was like, 'I am well aware of where I am and what this is and what this was about.' I was always really clear about that. Eggleton had a really strong financial team around him to make sure he got in. Had winning been what I had prepared for, I'd probably have a better answer.

On running for mayor in her early thirties, and then again for the NDP in 1990

At that particular time I did not know a whole lot about myself. You know my sons are now around the same age as me then and I think, "Oh my God," if they were to do that now. That was something I didn't think about, but I think about it now at 56. No wonder I was terrified. I barely knew myself.

The next time that I ran was in 1990 for the NDP. That was a little more intentional around winning. People thought with the traction around the '88 campaign and some of that mobilization that I'd make a good candidate. Now again being honest that wasn't my interest really in terms of career politics but I thought here's another opportunity to do some of that.

That one was closer, scarily close. That literally scared the shit out of me. I lost out by 49 votes. They were ready to do another recount and I was like, “I'm good.” It scared the incumbent enough to make him understand that the constituency was not fooling around. They wanted him and the government at that time to represent better. That Liberal government got put out that election and the NDP came in.

On if her run helped other female candidates

I couldn't really answer that truthfully because I don't know. I know people felt more comfortable running because they had said that to me, after seeing how it all worked out. There were a lot of people involved in my campaign who were councillors, female councillors, who had been very supportive so I knew it helped them frame their opportunities. I hope it did.

On why so few candidates come from marginalized communities

In politics you realize how candidates get beaten up even in the running. The States are notorious for it, and we're not much better. Your business is all out there, and it is what it is. But a lot of people do not like that kind of limelight and it becomes difficult because it's never about the issues that individual raises it's always about that individual.

For marginalized communities, when all your business is out there, it's very hard to concentrate on what you're trying to do when people are questioning your lifestyle. Like with black candidates: “They're only gonna represent black people.” I got that a lot. That we're always corrupt and the racism around that. When volunteers were canvassing for me, people would go, "Oh, I'm not voting for her. She's only going to represent black people." My sisters, who went canvassing, heard that and were completely shocked. You get marginalized about who you're going to represent.

I'd say, "Of course I am, but that's not going to stop me from representing you. This is why I'm running. I'm supposed to bring another dimension to the position of office in terms of understanding who I represent—it's a value-add.” That's how you need to answer that question.

On Rob Ford’s worldviews

Of all the things Rob Ford ever did, for which I don't think he ever should have been in office for, he had the worst worldview of anybody I had ever seen. And he said it: he's not even trying to disguise this. He said things in council about Chinese people and I was like, are you kidding me? And people didn't have a problem with it.

I was confounded [by his continual support] because if that had been any other community of people he'd have been gone before God got the news. That's a saying that we have. To make those kinds of comments, it’s about the worldview in terms of a white male with money and what that means to individuals. What that means to the people of Toronto. Those worldviews need to be challenged. But the excuses people made for it: wow, how far have we not come?

On diversity and multiculturalism initiatives

I won't join diversity committees: I just don't think they're effective because there's a lot of rhetoric around this stuff and it never gets implemented into workplaces so you see workplaces with no people of colour even to this day in Nova Scotia. Or maybe one or two—and our populations are not that small.

I'm doing training around worldviews rather than multiculturalism or, even, diversity, because you never got at self-examination and how collectively that impacted other people's worldviews. The way that we had been approaching it, people become really defensive and it shuts down the whole conversation. People want to protect what they have, and it becomes me-versus-you, us-versus-them type of scenario. I can paint a picture for you all day in terms of how racism affects my life but I want it to change so how do I create that opportunity for you to do that self-examination and to realize the impact of that? It flips the conversation a bit.

How you begin is not trying to change their worldview, but to ask the proper questions so that people begin to examine it for themselves, and to challenge themselves around how they see the world and why particular worldviews hold other people hostage. When you tell me that you don't see colour that is not a sophisticated or accurate analysis of the situation because you are seeing colour. You decided by saying that it doesn't matter—you decided that, but it does matter. How did you derive that? What do you believe? Questioning beliefs and values: how did you arrive here so that you believe this is true?

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Caste Your Vote: On Who's Allowed to Take Part

By Desmond Cole

For the past six years, I’ve been hosting a public conversation about citizenship and inclusion as project coordinator of City Vote, an effort to extend municipal voting rights to all permanent residents of Canada. Support for the initiative, while on the rise, is still lukewarm at best. A 2013 poll determined that just over half of Toronto residents are opposed to the idea – an improvement from my early days on the campaign, but still surprising in a city where half of the inhabitants were born abroad. Last year Toronto city council endorsed a motion on permanent resident voting by  21-20, the narrowest of margins (the city has asked the province, who has the final say on the issue, to consider it).

City Vote supporters often ask me why people oppose giving non-citizens the local vote. While I don’t have a complete answer, I’m convinced that the presumed supremacy of our country’s British parliamentary democracy is an important factor. The British colonized this land and imposed their system of government, not only on all those who would come after them, but on the people who were already here. The treatment of Canada’s indigenous people as outsiders, as aspirants to British civilization, can teach us a lot about the struggle to enfranchise today’s non-citizen immigrants.

When people object to City Vote’s mission, they cite reasons they feel are practical and almost unquestionable: that non-citizens do not understand Canadian history, society and culture; that they have not demonstrated the proper loyalty; that giving non-citizens a vote would devalue the votes of citizens; that non-citizens value other things above voting, and therefore have no use for it.

All of these arguments were made about indigenous people as Canada established and amended its voting regimes. All of them rely on the apparent superiority of our current form of government, and by extension, the superiority of the white British elites who established it and used their power to categorize and regulate all non-whites.

When Canada held its first federal election in 1867, the country’s diverse indigenous inhabitants were not included; with few exceptions, the same was true for the provincial and municipal elections that preceded and followed Confederation. At first, most jurisdictions saw no need to make rules for prohibiting indigenous voters, who were assumed to be government property. But in 1865, British Columbia explicitly banned “Indians and Chinese” from voting in its elections. Even before Canada became a country, “Indians,” whose land the British had taken as their own, were excluded alongside “Chinese,” who had migrated to work or trade. 

In 1885, Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, argued that Chinese people were not fit to vote because they possessed "no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations.”

“The Chinese are not like the Indians, sons of the soil. They come from a foreign country; they have no intent, as a people of making a domicile of any portion of Canada…. They are, besides, natives of a country where representative institutions are unknown, and I think we cannot safely give them the elective franchise.”

— Sir John A. Macdonald

Macdonald’s fear that people raised under foreign governments couldn’t be trusted is, sadly, still with us. Likewise, for the indigenous “sons of the soil,” Macdonald and Parliament had created the Indian Act, to regulated their day-to-day existence. Parliament had also provided in 1868 for “voluntary enfranchisement”, a system which gave indigenous people the right to vote if they agreed to renounce their status as Indians. Professor Larry Gilbert has written that enfranchisement was “based on the theory that aboriginal peoples in their natural state were uncivilized. Once an aboriginal person acquired the skills, the knowledge and the behavior valued by civilized society, the aboriginal person might qualify for citizenship."

The arbitrary classification of today’s immigrants, who are encouraged to graduate into civilized Canadian citizens before being granted the privilege of voting, is nothing new. Rules about voting have been applied differently to different groups of people, and race has always been a defining factor.

Ahyouwaighs, or John Brant. Painting by Charles Bird King.

Take the example of John Brant, an indigenous man who was elected to the Upper Canada Assembly, but whose election was subsequently nullified. As professor Veronica Strong-Boag wrote in 2002, “lease-holding, the proprietorship said to exist on Native reserves, was held not to count as property for the purpose of suffrage. Thus many of Brant's supporters were disenfranchised."

While indigenous people’s property rights were said not to count, the rights of white British subjects were upheld, and were sometimes even accepted in spite of the rules. As recently as 1969, British subjects who had lived in Canada for a year were eligible to vote, even South African citizens, although the country left the Commonwealth in 1961. Not by coincidence, South Africa has long contained Africa’s largest percentage of white inhabitants.

Today, there are no voting exemptions for property holders who are not Canadian citizens. As Ryerson professor Myer Siemiatycki has pointed out, Toronto’s municipal voter’s list includes property owners who are not residents of Toronto, but are still extended the right to vote, if they are citizens. Meanwhile, Siemiatycki notes, non-citizen property holders who do live here (and pay taxes here, and send their kids to school here, and otherwise contribute to and use the city) are excluded from voting at any level of government.

Before 1971, almost 80 per cent of immigrants to Canada were European – in other words, white. Between 2006 and 2011 more than 80 per cent of immigrants came from Asia, African, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

As the makeup of our country has changed, so have restrictions for voting rights. For more than a century, proof of property rights, residency and taxation were good enough to allow British subjects to vote at the local level. Today, citizenship is the new standard for today’s mostly racialized immigrants. Yet non-citizen British subjects could vote in municipal elections until 1985 in Ontario; they retained the municipal vote in Nova Scotia until 2007.

We must also remember that other classes of non-citizen residents – temporary foreign workers, refugees, student visa holders, and people without any documentation – are not part of the current conversation to extend voting rights. Indeed, the mere mention of these groups, particularly undocumented people, is a non-starter for politicians.

So it was with indigenous people in the early days of Confederation, when politicians like Conservative George Foster had to assure his colleagues that enfranchisement was not meant for all indigenous people: “it is not the intention nor is it in the power of this Bill to enfranchise the wild hordes of savage Indians all over the Dominion.”

The fact that we can even have a conversation about non-citizen voting proves that we have made great strides towards a more inclusive country. But the continued resistance to change is based on an outdated and ultimately racist view that outsiders, particularly racialized ones, must prove their allegiance to a British system founded on assumptions of white supremacy.

During the 1885 debates on electoral reform, Liberal MP Peter Mitchell stated, “I would give to everyone who has assumed the same position as the white man, who places himself in a position to contribute towards the general revenues of the country, towards maintaining the institutions of the country the right to vote.” Although few today would be so blunt, the same attitude applies. 

Ethnic Aisle

Fall 2014

Writers

Adwoa Afful
@thestreetidle

Desmond Cole
@desmondcole

Supriya Dwivedi 
@supriyadwivedi

Kelli Korducki
@kelkord

John Michael McGrath
@jm_mcgrath

Jaime Woo
@jaimewoo

Editors

Chantal Braganza
@chantalbraganza

Joan Chang
@joanchang

Helen Mo
@helenissimo

Neha Thanki
@nehathanki

Social Media

Septembre Anderson
@septembreA

Web

Simon Yau
@simyau

Editor-at-Large

Navneet Alang
@navalang 

Editor-in-Chief

Denise Balkissoon
@balkissoon

Publisher

Renee Sylvestre-Williams
@reneeswilliams

ethnicaisle@gmail.com I theethnicaisle.com

Toronto vs. Montreal: Ethnic Edition

By Supriya Dwivedi

I moved to Toronto from Montreal in the spring of 2013. The city was just coming to grips with the possibility that Rob Ford was abusing crack cocaine, and everybody I met had an opinion on the mayor, civic affairs, and the state of Toronto. Nuance was out the window: Ford was either the root of all conservative evil or an everyman’s hero just  trying to stick up for the little guy. My own opinion was one of muted bewilderment. It was very hard for this newcomer to grasp how someone with Mayor Ford’s history and record was elected with 47 per cent of the vote. 

It was refreshing to meet so many people who were engaged in spirited political discussion and committed to making their city a better place. The dissimilarity to Montreal in this regard was quite striking. Before the Charbonneau Commission over allegedly corrupt awarding of public construction contracts made it possible for Montrealers to speak openly about collusion around dinner tables and water coolers, few people found municipal politics worthy of much attention.

There was another aspect of life here that was quite unlike Montreal. From my very first day living in Toronto, the city’s diversity has been patently clear. The couples and groups around me at movie theatres and restaurants were rarely racially or ethnically homogenous. It was nice to live and work in a place where I didn’t have to explain that I needed to take a couple of days off for my sister’s wedding: everybody already knew what an Indian wedding entailed.

When I spoke about this difference, I was usually met with a look of pity, followed by comments along the lines of how awful living in Quebec must have been for my family. After all, everyone knows that Quebec, even Montreal, is a racist, and intolerant cesspool.  Get this: I actually did not grow up in Montreal, but in the town of Granby, about an hour east of the city in rural Quebec. Sometimes telling people this elicits audible gasps. People look at me as if I said I had grown up in Ferguson, Missouri. 

One of the greatest misconceptions regarding Quebec made by Torontonians – and let’s be honest, the Rest Of Canada– is that Quebecers are by and large an intolerant people. The data, however, indicates otherwise: racist attitudes are no more prevalent in Quebecthan in the rest of the country. Statistics Canada’s own figures indicate that racially and ethnically motivated hate crimes are more commonplace in Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and British Columbia than in Quebec. Even during the the debate over the Parti Québécois’ Charter of Quebec Values (and its egregious suggestions as to what people should do about their hijabs or kippahs), pollsters found again and again that the attitudes within the rest of Canada towards religious accommodation were only slightly more open than in Quebec. (Which makes much more sense when you factor in Quebec’s practice of interculturalism and the French notion of laïcité, i.e. public secularity.) 

There was not a single day in my life growing up in Granby that I was faced with racism; ignorant comments about language, sure, but never racist. But the first time I went canvassing for former Toronto mayoral candidate David Soknacki, a voter referred to me as a “paki” and mayoral candidate Olivia Chow as a “chink.” Over the course of several months canvassing and talking to voters after debates or all candidate meetings, I heard my fair share of racial slurs. I am dismayed to imagine what Ms. Chow has had to bear. 

Initially, I was stunned into speechlessness that racial epithets were being used to describe me in 2014 Toronto. Over time, however, the casual racism became a part of campaign life, along with sleep deprivation and stress eating. Perhaps the oddest part of all this is the fact that many of those who referred to me as one of the “coloureds” weren’t actually doing so in contempt. More than once I was asked why I wasn’t working for Rob Ford. “He’s the only one that cares about the coloureds." Being referred to as a coloured person by middle aged Caucasian men while they touted Rob Ford’s white saviour complex as evidence of his commitment to racialized people was not exactly how I had envisioned campaigning in the fourth largest city in North America.

No, my sample size of one doesn’t result in hard conclusions on the comparative sociological underpinning of race relations in Canada’s urban centres. But having lived in both Montreal and Toronto, this is how I see it: At least Montrealers wholeheartedly acknowledge that the city, and Quebec, are constantly fraught with linguistic tension. In Toronto, lip-service pride in our multicultural heritage hasn’t changed the monochromatic makeup of the media, opinion leaders, judiciary or, of course, City Council. Perhaps it’s about time Torontonians realized that we’re not the accepting, diverse utopia that we pretend to be.

Toronto’s First Black Female (Almost) Mayor: An Interview with Carolann Wright-Parks

By Jaime Woo

In 1988, community organizer Carolann Wright-Parks became the first black woman to run for mayor of Toronto, against incumbent Art Eggleton. Born and raised in Beechville, Nova Scotia, the oldest indigenous black community in Canada, Wright-Parks had lived in Toronto for nearly a decade when she ran. She finished second in a field of nine with 24,479 votes, or 17.4 per cent. (Eggleton won with 64.9 per cent of the vote.) Wright-Parks was always realistic about the purpose of the campaign—to drive awareness rather than to win—but she nonetheless made history.

Her campaign was part of a string of elections that saw women land in second place, before the six years between 1991 and 1997 that Toronto was led by June Rowlands and Barbara Hall.

She was also the first and last visible contender of colour until Olivia Chow, a unfathomable quarter of a century later. Drawing direct comparisons is unhelpful: Chow is a career politician, Wright-Parks was not; Chow is running post-amalgamation, Wright-Parks faced only old town; and Wright-Parks challenged an incumbent expected to win, unlike the three-ring Ford circus. Yet, in her own words, Wright-Parks calls it "very shocking" that there have been few viable candidates of colour since her run.

In 1994, Wright-Parks returned to Halifax. She is now the Director of Community Economic Development and Strategic Engagement at the Greater Halifax Partnership. The following excerpts are from an interview done with Wright-Parks at the end of August.

 It’s not meant as direct commentary on the current election. Instead, it is an occasion to look at our city’s past, and reflect on how some things have stayed the same.

ON ANNOUNCING HER RUN

“I was not expecting to run. I'm an organizer, not usually a frontperson. It was purely the community who said, ‘Look, we'd appreciate if you did this because it would highlight the issues that we work so hard from day to day. It would give a face to the issues of anti-poverty.' I had no political experience at that time (but now I understand that that doesn't matter!) and was not politically sophisticated at all, but I knew what the agenda was.

“When I first announced, there was a pause because I don't think a black woman had ever ran before. A black man had been in city council in the 1800's at some point a long time ago (William Peyton Hubbard, a City of Toronto Alderman from 1894 to 1914) but I think I was the first black woman who had ever run, period. So, there was some pause, like 'is it serious?'

ON CANDIDATES FROM MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES

“In politics you realize how candidates get beaten up even in the running. Your business is all out there, and it is what it is. For marginalized communities, when all your business is out there, it's very hard to concentrate on what you're trying to do when people are questioning your lifestyle.

“Like with black candidates: ‘They're only gonna represent black people.’ I got that a lot. That we're always corrupt and the racism around that. When volunteers were canvassing for me, people would go, "Oh, I'm not voting for her. She's only going to represent black people." My sisters, who went canvassing, heard that and were completely shocked. You get marginalized about who you're going to represent.

“I'd say, ‘Of course I am, but that's not going to stop me from representing you. This is why I'm running. I'm supposed to bring another dimension to the position of office in terms of understanding who I represent—it's a value-add.’

“If you're a black person, people make the mistake of saying, ‘I'm not here to represent black people. I represent everybody.’ But you are representing your community. I was representing a segment of my community. That's the reality of it. I never apologized for that.

ON THE MAIN ISSUES DURING HER CAMPAIGN

“During that period there was a lot of police violence against young black men. The issue of race in Toronto was extremely volatile, particularly about policing. And, if you were a poor single mother in the system, and God forbid you were black, people thought it was okay to treat you a particular way. We had to not only address this in the campaign in a practical way, but get it on the Mayor's agenda.

“Young people growing up in Regent Park and St. Lawrence and surrounding areas in the city did not vote. They did not care and were not interested because they felt they were not cared about either. I think people were at that particular time fed up with the dismissiveness around low-income communities and homelessness: things that were just not on the Mayor's agenda at that time. We wanted to let people know their voice counted. It counted on election night.

“The voter turnout was excellent during that campaign because we spent time in communities doing things that were not traditionally done in civic campaigns. I never really thought about [winning] at that time to be perfectly honest with you. We were so focused on the campaign issues.”

ON HOW TO HANDLE DISCUSSIONS OF RACE

“The way that we had been approaching it, people become really defensive and it shuts down the whole conversation. People want to protect what they have, and it becomes me-versus-you, us-versus-them type of scenario. I can paint a picture for you all day in terms of how racism affects my life but I want it to change so how do I create that opportunity for you to do that self-examination and to realize the impact of that? It flips the conversation a bit.

“How you begin is not trying to change their worldview, but to ask the proper questions so that people begin to examine it for themselves, and to challenge themselves around how they see the world and why particular worldviews hold other people hostage.

“When you tell me that you don't see colour, that is not a sophisticated or accurate analysis of the situation because you are seeing colour. You decided by saying that it doesn't matter—you decided that, but it does matter.

“How did you derive that? What do you believe? Questioning beliefs and values: how did you arrive here so that you believe this is true?”

To read the whole interview, go here.

Built Ford Tough: Ward 2 candidate Andray Domise

By Adwoa Afful

Ethnic Aisle: On your blog you define yourself, among other things, as an activist.  How do you define that term and how has that changed since running for council?

Andray Domise: I’ve been agitating for civic engagement for a very long time. Usually it’s in the form of get-out-and-vote efforts around election days. What troubles me the most is the level of apathy that I run into when I speak to the African-Canadian community, specifically the Caribbean-Canadian one: “there is no point, nothing is ever going to change, why bother.” We make up 8 percent of Toronto’s population. If we actually woke up and used the voices that God gave us and used the voting rights that we have, we can actually see a lot of changes happen in Toronto.

EA: Throughout your campaign you have been pretty vocal about issues related to systemic racism that African-Canadian communities face.  What are some the challenges in talking about systemic racism so openly?

AD: The challenges in talking about race aren’t actually challenging. From my perspective, people tend to like honesty. If I, as a Black candidate, am not willing to speak openly and frankly about what systemic racism does, what stereotyping and prejudice does, the damage that, for example, the chief magistrate of our city [does when] calling our young people “niggers,” and “thugs” and “fucking minorities,” if I can’t be honest about the damage that that’s causing, then I’m just remaining silent in the face of evil. [From] my perspective it’s not hard to talk about this stuff. I didn’t get into this necessarily to just get myself elected, but to try to change the political conversation that we’re having in Toronto, which to me is toxic and it’s self-defeating. [The]  part that’s a little disheartening is that people from within my own community are saying “you need to tone it down, you gotta to dial it back,  don’t be so harsh, don’t be so forward, you gotta take your time.” If this isn’t the time for us to have this conversation, when exactly is that going to happen?

Andray Domise on the campaign trail. Image taken from his Twitter account. 

EA: Why do you think that there is backlash when you talk about race from members within your own community?

AD: Because we’re frightened and afraid and a lot of us are cowards. A lot of us are afraid that if we speak about this stuff openly that there is going to be a backlash. James Baldwin once said the only time that non-violence in America is praised is when a negro practices it.  We tell ourselves it’s not okay to speak openly and honestly our experiences because we might make people uncomfortable.

EA: So do you see yourself as a lightning rod in this campaign, as the person who’s going to help agitate or reverse that pattern of apathy within the African-Canadian community in Ward 2?

AD: There are people like Idil Burale running in Ward 1, and she’s facing an uphill battle against Vince Crisanti. Idil is so amazing, she’s on the Somali liaison unit for 23 division, to help foster a better relationship between Rexdale police and the Somali community. And I look at somebody like Lekan Olawoye running in Ward 12 against John Nunziata, Kegan Henry Mathews who’s fighting an uphill battle against Giorgio Mammoliti. These people are doing the work by themselves, they’re doing it alone. The fact is if you have a problem with the way that we’re treated in the city and the way that we’re represented, it’s up to you to get your ass up off your chair and do something.

EA: You brought up Idil Burale who is running for council in Ward 1, and has worked to create initiatives that addresses issues like police carding, which disproportionately affects Black Torontonians. Would you ever consider collaborating with other councillors on initiatives meant to address issues that affect African-Canadian communities across Toronto?

AD:  Absolutely! Etobicoke North has the highest diagnosis rate for type 2 diabetes for young people for all of Canada. That’s because there is a lack of access to recreational facilities, lack of access to nutritional foods, lack of access to transportation and that has led us to have very sedentary and junk food laden lifestyles and diets. It affects the South Asian community also, but you know it’s magnified on us, it affects white people in the Ward, but it’s magnified on us.

EA: Your background is in insurance and you worked for large companies like SunLife Financial, and you talk a lot about proposing business based solutions to address some of the issues facing Ward 2. How can the business sector or the private sector help address some of the issues you’re campaigning on?

AD: We have a ton of green space and a ton of undeveloped land, you don’t even have to have a business background per se, you can simply take a look around. It’s a very, very undeveloped area. Development skipped over Etobicoke altogether and headed over to Mississauga. I was just over at Square One yesterday, and there is just so much development happening. Because they had all that open real estate Mayor Hazel McCallion saw this and said “we’re going to build right here,” and they’ve been at that work for the last 20 years and it’s amazing how much change has happened.

What really makes me sad about that is that the Applewood area of Mississauga is a very low-income area. You can compare it to Rexdale in a lot of ways, in the sense that it’s lower income and very, very diverse. You could do the exact same kind of work in Rexdale. You could have a partnership with those developers to say “look, if you want to build here that’s great, but what you’re going to do is provide neighbourhood services, green spaces, public spaces, rec centres, better access to transportation.”

EA: You have also talked eloquently about the stigma that surrounds Rexdale and other communities in Ward 2, as a result of being designated as a priority area.  What do you think the rest of Toronto has to learn from the communities in Rexdale?

AD: Churches and charities, they’re the glue that holds this neighbourhood together. People may not be politically active, but they are socially and consciously active, in the sense that they want the best for themselves and their neighbours. There are people who volunteer at the Rexdale community health centre, Pathways to Education, [and] churches. My own church, for example, before school starts we'll go and knock on doors in our neighbourhood and hand out $50 gift cards to Staples to make sure that people who don’t have enough money to get back to school supplies for their kids at least have something.  We have done the hard work of filling in the gap that our political classes refuse to fill. And something that I am really proud of is that we come together as a community in times of need and make sure that we provide for each other.

EA: What is your favourite spot in Rexdale, where do you go to chill or where do you go to re energize yourself?

AD: During the summertime, Pine Point is a really awesome place, and I just like to go jogging up there, or take the car up and read a book. The Humber trails are some of the best walking trails that you’ll find in Toronto. The amount of parks and trails that we have here in Rexdale is amazing.