Toronto / October 2023
“End renovictions! Bring back rent controls”! “What do we want”? “Rent controls”! “When do we want it”? “Now”!
The chants - the call and response of rallies and demonstrations of years past and current moments of protests, echoed faintly along University Avenue as a scraggly group of just over one hundred concerned residents walked from Toronto City Hall to Queen’s Park.
Toronto / September 2023
It is anti-Black racism. Intentional or not, the result of a shelter and housing crisis and an ongoing flow of asylum seekers into the larger urban centres of Ontario - has resulted in hundreds of refugee claimants sleeping rough on the streets or unsustainably housed in makeshift emergency shelters in the halls of Black churches in the GTA. Many had been moved here by the federal government to appease and support Quebec’s capacity challenges.
Toronto / August 2023
And before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free…
Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen….
This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine
Shine all over the world…
By the river of Babylon, where we sat down, and where we wept, as we remembered Zion…
July 2023 / Toronto
The first note of alarm came by email through the African Solidarity Network e-list. The Network is an alliance of leaders of African descent from the continent and the diaspora.
June 2023 / Toronto
May 2023 / Toronto
The stories of escape from escalating indiscriminate violence are harrowing. An adult daughter sharing how it took her and her diabetic mother six days to get to the Egyptian border. Another telling of calling Global Affairs Canada to register herself and family as bullets and bombs dropped all around them and being told to ‘shelter in place’; not hearing back until weeks later when a call came that there was space on a German airlift at a place twenty-five kilometers away. She made it and is now back home in Canada.
The last week of March was a perfect storm. A gathering or cascade of negative news for our most marginalized communities and individuals made vulnerable by systems and political priorities that broaden and deepen the chasm between those who own and control points of access and those who are seen as expendable.
March 2023 / Toronto
My inbox has been filled these past weeks of this new year with pleas for support for women facing deportation orders, some with Canadian born children still breastfeeding.
In almost all cases they’ve exhausted all appeals and have thrown themselves on the mercy of the Canadian government by filing a Humanitarian and Compassionate (H&C) application. An H&C can take up to three years or more to process, and does not delay or stop a deportation order. The success rates is less than fifty percent.
February 2023 / Toronto
The new year dawned with me in a security line heading out of Kenya’s international airport in Nairobi. It was my first sojourn to East Africa and I marveled at the majority of white faces around me. Judging from the immigration control lines which they joined, many are representatives of international NGOs including UN Agencies or returning spouses of Black Kenyan migrants to Europe and North America.
January 2023 / Toronto
It is the fourth day of Kwanzaa as I sit down to write this first blog of the new year, three days before the first day of 2023. Kwanzaa is a Pan-African diasporic holiday celebration created in 1966 by African-American Maulana Ron Karenga. It celebrates history, community, family and culture. And the seven principles celebrated over seven days (December 26th to January 1st) are grounded in the Swahili language, one of the most commonly spoken African languages across the continent.
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