RACE RELATIONS : Charges of Prejudice Rattle Canadians

For decades, Canadians have prided themselves on the apparent colorblind nature of their society, on a level of tolerance that seemed to contrast sharply with the racism they heard about in the United States.

Canada never had black slavery; it was a terminus of the old underground railroad out of the antebellum South. “Multiculturalism” has long been the official policy of the federal government here. And a visitor to this, Canada’s largest city, can search without finding a sprawling, hopeless, American-style black ghetto. There are poor neighborhoods, but nothing like the South Bronx or South-Central Los Angeles.

But now, a series of ugly, race-related events--including a mini-riot just days after the violence in Los Angeles--have made Canadians realize that racial discrimination can, and does, exist here too.

The events culminated in the release this week of a damning report on race relations in Ontario, Canada’s largest province, by Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.

Lewis, who is white, said that the worst Canadian racism was directed against blacks--an assertion that is apt to leave native Canadians sputtering.

“It is blacks who are being shot (by police), it is black youth that is unemployed in excessive numbers, it is black students who are being inappropriately” assigned to lower tracks in schools, Lewis wrote.

Black interest groups in Toronto have expressed a degree of satisfaction with the report.

But Oswald James of the Black Business and Professional Assn. said it was “a slap in the face” that black Canadians’ problems weren’t being taken seriously until a prominent white personage reported on them.

Ontario Premier Bob Rae ordered the study in May, after two nights of window-smashing, looting and confrontations with the police in Toronto’s main shopping district.

The sprees came not only on the heels of the Los Angeles riots but also immediately after the fatal shooting of a black drug suspect in Toronto by a white undercover police officer.

That was just the latest in a number of police shootings of black youths in Toronto and Montreal.

In every such case, the officers have been exonerated. Besides the police shootings, there have been race-based riots in Montreal and Halifax during the past year, and in Toronto, black-white gang fighting has broken out, most recently during an unofficial “skip-out” day at the end of the school year.

Such incidents are tearing at Canada’s image of itself as a paragon of racial tolerance.

“Canadians have thought of themselves as being racially tolerant in the absence of anybody to be intolerant of,” says Allan Sheppard, editor of a multicultural newspaper published in Edmonton, Alberta.

Sheppard points out that when he was growing up in western Canada, there were so few blacks that every time he saw one he assumed the man was an American, imported to play professional football.

But now, thanks to a change in the immigration law, Canada grants entry to far more blacks and other so-called “visible minorities” than to whites. The resulting flood of Africans, Middle Easterners, Latin Americans and Asians has clearly unnerved the whites who have traditionally made up Canadian society.

A recent poll showed that more than half of Canadians fear their country has taken in more multiracial immigrants than it can comfortably absorb.