Honourable senators:

Stolen from the plots of quixotic Pierrot and troubled Muddy Waters, these elegiac flowers of Whylah Falls, the Black Mississippi village banished to Jarvis County, Nova Scotia, in 1783, droop with the heaviness of history. Irrigated by liquor and tears and dessicated by blistering blues, they bloom in direct moonlight. Though intended originally for the garden of Whylah Falls, these loose flowers are freely planted here.

These are the words of our former Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Elliott Clarke, found in The Apocrypha of Whylah Falls, his treatise on his birthplace, a place he calls Africadia, and the place where Africans first came to Canada; the place, at the time known as Acadia, and today, better known as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Those loose flowers, these elegiac flowers of George Elliott Clarke’s poetry, represent the over 3,000 people of African descent who came to Birchtown, Nova Scotia in 1783. The fictional Aminata Diallo and her very real fellow Black Loyalist brothers and sisters who were brought to life and to our attention by Canadian author Lawrence Hill in his famous novel and the CBC miniseries, The Book of Negroes: African women, men and children who were brutally stolen from their farms and villages in Africa and sold as slaves in the Caribbean and America.

On June 15, 2010, the Honourable Senator Donald Oliver, another African Nova Scotian, rose in this chamber to say:

Honourable senators, it seems that every day we see new evidence showing that racism still exists in Canada. Sadly, hate crimes motivated by race and religion are on the rise in this country. Honourable senators, I believe that we must do something about this.

He went on to say:

Honourable senators, the questions these facts beg are: What can be done to reduce the rising number of hate crimes in Canada? Why are Blacks the most commonly targeted racial group?

. . . These questions need answers. In my view, the Senate is a good place to launch such a dialogue. We should have a thorough debate on racism, diversity and pluralism in Canada. . .

I believe it is time for Canada to acquire new tools fit for the 21st century to fight hatred and racism, to reduce the number of hate crimes, and to increase Canada’s tolerance in matters of race and religion.

In this same vein, Senator Wanda Elaine Thomas Bernard has introduced an inquiry into anti-Black racism in Canada. Many of our colleagues have spoken to that matter.

Senator Oliver referred to the need for Canada to acquire new, 21st-century tools to fight hatred and racism. Only last month, Senator Bernard introduced Bill S-255, the Emancipation Day Act, An Act proclaiming Emancipation Day. The act will enable Canadians to have a special day each year to commemorate the abolition of slavery.

[Translation]

This bill proclaiming August 1 as Emancipation Day across Canada will be a very important tool for raising awareness about Canada’s role in slavery and emancipation, the negative effects of slavery felt to this day in our society and the contribution of the descendants of slaves and other African Canadians to our country.

[English]

Emancipation Day can be a powerful tool to educate and create awareness and recognition.

Earlier this week, $10 banknotes commemorating civil rights icon Viola Desmond officially entered circulation, the first time a Canadian woman has been celebrated on the face of her country’s currency. This is a historic occasion in so many ways. A Canadian woman is being recognized — an African Nova Scotian woman and a civil rights challenger at that.

By now, we have all heard the story of Ms. Desmond: her successful beauty business serving her fellow African Nova Scotian women; we’ve heard of her car breaking down and her desire to watch a movie from the floor section of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow which was, at the time, in 1946, segregated, with Black people only allowed in the balcony section. This was nine years before the famous Rosa Parks bus incident south of the border.

Ms. Desmond was arrested, briefly jailed, charged, convicted and fined. Later, in 2010, long after Viola’s passing in 1965, Nova Scotia gave her a free pardon, which was signed into law by the then Black Lieutenant Governor, Mayann Francis.

But what of these two African Nova Scotian women, the famous civil rights hero and the gifted Lieutenant-Governor? How did they and their families end up in Nova Scotia? What is the history of Black immigration to Nova Scotia and Canada, and what is its link to slavery?

Like their African Nova Scotian counterparts, Ms. Desmond and Ms. Francis can trace their origins to slavery. The story of the underground railroad and the link to Ontario is fairly well recognized in Canada, but the history of African Nova Scotians is not well known.

African people and people of African descent came to what is now known as Nova Scotia — George Elliott Clarke’s Africadia — in a number of waves. Although the now better-known immigration of slaves and freed slaves into the Maritime provinces at the time of the Loyalist immigration in 1783 is often thought of as the first wave of slave immigration, in fact there was a much earlier influx of enslaved people.

[Translation]

France’s King Louis XIV issued a royal proclamation in 1689 which gave Canadians permission to benefit from the services of African slaves by declaring that all “Negroes” who have been purchased or are owned shall be the property of those who have purchased them, giving them full ownership.

[English]

Even before the royal mandate in 1604, Mathieu da Costa is said to be the first Black person in Nova Scotia. He’s recorded among the founders of Port-Royal, established by Samuel de Champlain on traditional Mi’kmaw territory, close to the present-day town of Annapolis Royal.

The Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, then called Isle Royale, was said to be home to 200 Black slaves during the French regime. Marie Marguerite Rose is famous among them. She became a slave at the age of 19 and gained her freedom 19 years later, marrying a Mi’kmaw man and opening a tavern in Louisbourg, becoming part of the business community she had previously been forced to serve.

The next significant wave of Black immigration was the most famous one, and the largest: that of the Black Loyalists. When the U.S. War of Independence ended in 1783, New York was the last British-held port. It became the embarkation point for thousands of Loyalists, Black and White. Some Blacks came to Nova Scotia as property of White Loyalists. Between 3,000 and 3,500 Black Loyalists who had been offered protection, freedom, land and rations for their support of the British during the war also immigrated at this time.

British officials drew up a detailed list of all Blacks who were leaving. That list, The Book of Negroes, stated whether the person was free, a slave or an indentured servant and what their military service had been.

Roughly half of them settled where they landed in Birchtown and others settled in other parts of Nova Scotia, including in my area, in the Tracadie and Guysborough settlements. Lionel Desmond, the Afghan war veteran Senator Cormier recently spoke of, who killed himself and his family, is from one of those settlements, Upper Big Tracadie.

As you can imagine, the good land went to the White Loyalists and the Black Loyalists were not given what had been promised to them. Things got so bad that over 1,000 of them left Nova Scotia to help establish Freetown, in Sierra Leone.

In 1796, 600 Trelawny Town Maroons were exiled from Jamaica to Nova Scotia. They, too, faced misery and most left for Sierra Leone.

After 1813, roughly 2,000 Black refugees from the War of 1812 also found their way to the Maritimes. Slavery was then officially abolished in the British Empire in 1833.

From the 1920s on, hundreds of Caribbean immigrants came to Cape Breton to work in the coal mines and the steel industry.

(1540)

Our two African Nova Scotian women mentioned earlier came to Nova Scotia in two different waves. Former Lieutenant Governor Mayann Francis’s parents came to Cape Breton from the Caribbean — Cuba and Antigua — both countries populated much earlier by slaves from Africa. Some of Viola Desmond’s ancestors were likely Black Loyalists who would have landed at Birchtown and then resettled elsewhere.

But even with slavery officially abolished in 1833, its legacy persists in many ways in Nova Scotia and across our country.

Dr. Isaac Saney of Dalhousie University says:

The disadvantages, the disenfranchisement, the racist attitudes, the racist segregation — that did not disappear.

All of these factors create significant barriers to success for African Canadians, as Senator Bernard has told us.

However shameful this chapter of our history was, the Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia presents the topic to its local African Nova Scotian community in the following way on its website:

Slavery is a part of our history and culture —

This is geared to African Nova Scotians.

— that we should not ignore or find humiliating. Our ancestors were captured like animals, treated as property, separated from their families, and routinely subjected to even more unbearable treatment. Surviving this made us a strong people, empowered to rise above racism. The magnificent contribution that Africans made to society is a legacy we must convey to future generations in all walks of life.

By instituting Emancipation Day across Canada, these historical lessons and lessons in cultural pride would be reinforced annually.

Colleagues, I could speak more about examples of modern-day slavery here and around the world — think of Mauritania — but I will not at this moment.

My last story is a very local one — yet another Nova Scotia story. It’s a story of the legacy of slavery and of racism in my own backyard. Just last month, a young Black man went to hospital in New Glasgow to be treated for a collapsed lung caused by a co-worker shooting him with a nail-gun on a work site. The young man had been bullied and goaded by a co-worker who even joked that every White person deserves to own a Black person. Apparently, the young man was reluctant to report the bullying because his co-workers would say things like, “We don’t like how those Black people always pull the race card.”

Colleagues, this is Pictou County, Nova Scotia, in 2018, not Birchtown in 1783.

As we celebrate the civil rights legacy of Viola Desmond this week with our gorgeous new $10 bill, let’s remember how we still have a long way to go. Let’s remember the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., words quoted by the mother of the young injured Pictou County man:

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Colleagues, as senators we have opportunities to put in place laws and other mechanisms to help foster that balance among the power, love and the justice we need in our society. Senator Bernard has presented us with just such an opportunity, Bill S-255, an Act proclaiming Emancipation Day. It provides us all with a special day in our annual calendars to remember the sacrifices of slaves, to examine our history and the legacies of that slave-master relationship, and to celebrate the resilience and accomplishments of African Canadian people.

[Translation]

Honourable senators, it is important for the education and evolution of our Canadian society.

[English]

Let’s use the power and responsibility we have been entrusted with to support this very important bill. Welalioq.