More than a year after Canada proclaimed Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day, Black leaders and scholars are renewing their calls for Ottawa to make a formal apology for the country's history of slavery and its intergenerational harms. ottnews cdnpoli
Author Elise Harding-Davis said Sunday that the federal government’s vote last March to recognize Emancipation Day shows Canadian leaders know that the country’s history of slavery has caused generations of harm to Black people.“An apology would mean recognition of the fact that we were enslaved in this country,” Harding-Davis said in an interview.
The Slavery Abolition Act freed all enslaved people, including Indigenous people, Harding-Davis said, adding: "A determination to free Black people helped free all people, and that's huge.""It's just been sidelined and brushed under the rug as much as possible," she said.
Some will argue that an apology isn't warranted, she said, since Canada was formed in 1867, more than three decades after slavery ended. But Cooper said that reasoning doesn't hold up, adding that the country formed in 1867 was built from what it was in the years before. Nova Scotia Sen. Wanda Thomas Bernard said Sunday that it is "absolutely" time for a federal apology for the country's practice of enslaving Black people and its lasting harms, but she said an apology is empty without action.
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