Executive Director's Message

June 2022 / Toronto

I slept through it. TV on full blast at 3:00 am when I was awoken to hear CBC reporting what was by then old news. The Ford government had not only won a majority as predicted by media and other pundits, but he had a super majority. Didn’t really take it all in at that bewitching hour of the early morning; the time when our ancestors and angels whisper truths to us. I turned off the TV and went back to sleep a dreamless sleep.

May 2022 / Toronto

“Happy Mother’s Day to the moms separated by violent borders and imperialism”* was a tweet that crossed my screen early on Mother’s Day as I prepared to visit my own mother, ever thankful that my own separation from the woman who birthed me was a short three years, though as a child it felt like a lifetime. The tweet was from a feminist, anti-racist Black mother of a Black son whose community has experienced war, displacement and migration.

April 2022 / Toronto - The reported atrocities across Ukraine have added to the urgency to respond felt by Ukrainian and other concerned communities here in Canada.

March 2022 / Toronto

“When someone shows you who they are believe them”. This quote, often attributed to celebrated and well-loved African-American poet and author, Maya Angelou, appeared time and again on my various social media platforms as primarily Black, Asian and Arab people found themselves gaslighted, contradicted and called out, for raising concerns about the treatment of Black and racialized people, primarily international students attempting to flee the devastating war in Ukraine.

February 2022 / Toronto

Afro-futurism/African-Canadian Liberation/Black histories/ month- all contested and complex concepts. Not surprising given our people’s four hundred plus year presence on these Indigenous lands colonized and settled by the colonizers. Our place in the meta-narratives of what we now call Canada, diminished when not completely erased. Still. 2022.

December 2021 / Toronto

We enter this last month of the calendar year with increasing alarm and some frustration as new variants of the COVID-19 are detected here at home and throughout the world. Frustration- or at least mine, comes from the knee jerk response of the Canadian and other high income countries quickly moving to shut their borders primarily to travellers from countries in the Global South, in this case countries in southern Africa including South Africa (not considered a global south country).

November 2021 / Toronto

I forgot. For a long moment I forgot that I/we are living in “The Wake”, to borrow from Christina Sharpe. Sometimes the four hundred years old waves and eddies are disguised by the islands of liberation we carve out for ourselves in these broad and deep oceans of racialization and racism. Anti-Black racism.

October 2021 / Toronto

We can exhale as a sector now that the federal election is behind us and we have at least a month or two before we turn our attention to the scheduled Ontario provincial election in June 2022 and the Ontario Municipal elections in October 2022.

The announcement of the federal election call and the news about the escalating crisis in Afghanistan occurred within hours of each other, the latter threatening to derail the former before the campaigns had even begun.

Toronto / July 28, 2021

OCASI made submissions to Ontario's Task Force on Women and the Economy for its consultation on women’s participation in the economy and Ontario’s workforce.