No Little Plans

Repairing Justice in the Arctic

In Episode 14 of No Little Plans, we look at policing in Canada’s eastern Arctic. What does safety look like for Inuit? And how do communities feel justice is being served?The criminal justice system—the courts, the prison system, the police—is designed to protect Canadians and distribute justice fairly. But your interactions with the system have a lot to do with who and where you are in Canada. According to data reporting from CBC, Inuit are dying during interactions with police at a significantly higher rate in Nunavut and Nunavik than elsewhere in the Arctic. Meanwhile, a number of elected officials and Inuit leaders have been calling for a full-systematic review of policing in Nunavut. Last year, as the world faced a reckoning with police violence, a video surfaced. It shows a man in Kinngait, Nunavut, walking on the side of the road, when an officer in an RCMP vehicle suddenly pulls up behind him, opens his side door and knocks the man to the ground. According to Nunatsiaq News, this was the sixth incidence of police violence to be investigated externally in 2020. More than 200 marched in downtown Iqaluit in protest. And in this episode of No Little Plans, we look at Sustainable Development Goal #16: peace, justice and strong institutions. “There's so much trauma, both lived and remembered, and then intergenerational. That's usually the first thing that people point to, to help explain how things have gotten the way that they have”  –Thomas RohnerThomas Rohner is a CBC investigative journalist based in Iqaluit who reports on criminal justice in the Arctic. After a few years, he noticed that the number of police-related deaths reported in the area seemed disproportionate to the population. So he collected data from Nunavut’s coroner dating back to 1999, as well as data from Ontario for comparison. “In 21 years of data that we looked at, Nunavut’s rate of police-related deaths was more than nine times higher than Ontario's. In just the last decade, that number was more than 14 times higher,” he says. (For Rohner’s purposes, police-related deaths refers to any deaths that occurred during, after or in police custody.) He spoke to Inuit leaders who attributed the problems to the troubled historical relationship between police and Inuit communities. “The elected leader of a large Inuit organization told me that when she was a kid growing up, she would see police cars,” he says. “They didn't inspire a sense of safety. It was the opposite—where memories were triggered of how police treated her family members.” From the RCMP perspective, he says, community officers are never off duty. If they’re sleeping, they’re on call, and there’s little to no backup available. “It’s the logistical thing that comes up on a regular basis that leaves the police saying, ‘Well, Nunavut’s a special case. And in Nunavut saying, ’Don't we deserve the same as everyone else?’” In response to recent public scrutiny, the RCMP launched a body-cam project in Iqaluit last November, aiming to get all officers on shift setup with body-worn-cameras. The promise is big: rebuild public confidence. But who will gain access to the video? How will it be stored? And when will officers be able to turn their own cameras on and off?We reached out to the RCMP for comment on this episode, but they said they couldn't respond in time for our deadline. Since we recorded our interviews, the RCMP released a statement about the second run of a program to get more Inuit into basic training. And that they’ve signed a working agreement with Pauktuutit, the organization that represents Inuit women.“Justice is about a community of people who feel like they belong in their community...If people genuinely feel like they are safe, they are loved, they belong, then things would be a lot better” —Joseph Murdoch-FlowersLater in the episode, we hear from Curtis Mesher, a Jane Glassgo policy fellow at the Gordon Foundation, where he’s researching criminal justice reform and police oversight in the north. While the RCMP police most of the Canadian north, Nunavik—where Mesher lives—is served by the Kativik Regional Police Force. Although the KRPF is an Indigenous police force on paper, they have trouble recruiting Indigenous officers, so they’re forced to mostly hire French-speaking officers from southern Quebec. Mesher says this creates a culture clash between the officers and the community they’re serving. “They're quite literally outsiders in most senses of the term, be it language, culture, understanding of the region,” he says, suggesting they might be instilling values that are at odds with the community.Joseph Murdoch-Flowers, a legal aid lawyer in Iqaluit, meanwhile, argues that colonial law doesn’t always reflect Inuit values. In the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, citizens are guaranteed the right to remain silent. “For many Inuit, it's counterproductive to take that route because bottling it up inside and holding onto their own knowledge of their own offending behavior is unhealthy,” he says. “An important part of healing and moving on in a healthy way is admitting to a mistake and seeking forgiveness.” He echoes Mesher’s concerns about the lack of Indigenous representation in the criminal justice system up north. “The way I see it now is... it’s the colonial law that prevails,” he says. “Any iindigenous way of dealing with any sort of conflict is marginalized. But it is meaningful and valuable—especially to indigenous people.”

Northern Connectivity

We do everything online—shopping, school, health care. So what happens when our communities don’t have reliable internet? In Episode 13 of No Little Plans, we look at the rapidly evolving digital divide in Canada’s north.The pandemic has made it clear that access to a reliable internet connection is necessary to live, work and engage meaningfully in civic life. But for many remote communities, internet isn’t a reliable resource. Canada has pledged to provide high-speed internet access to its hardest-to-reach areas by 2030. But the way we engage online is quickly evolving, along with our networks—and the chasm between the digital haves and have-nots is only growing wider. According to the Canadian Radio-Television & Communications Commission, less than half of rural households have the internet speed required for online learning tools. Meanwhile, the majority of Canada’s north depends on satellite internet, which can be unreliable (the service is slow and spotty) and expensive (monthly bills can soar up to $1,200). Bad weather can put a community out of service completely. This presents a huge challenge for northern communities who need to access education, conduct business and stay connected to friends and family.“It's the total loss of connection, which can last several hours or, or even several days. And you never really know when this is going to happen” —Mark BrazeauIn this episode, host Tokunbo Adegbuyi interviews Andrea Brazeau, a fourth-year student at McGill University’s Faculty of Education. Andrea is originally from Kangiqsualujjuaq, in Nunavik, Quebec, and last fall she wrote an open letter to the premier of Quebec to draw attention to the internet gaps her northern community faces. Unlike some of her classmates, Andrea stayed in Montreal for the fall semester because she knew she wouldn’t be able to access online learning from her home in northern Quebec. “It was difficult because Montreal is the coronavirus hotspot. The one thing I thought about was my mental health—being alone,” she says. “My family is up north and I thought, how am I going to do this? How am I going to make it through the semester? In Kangiqsualujjuaq, connectivity is so unreliable that sometimes Andrea’s family loses internet for days at a time. While making the episode, Andrea asks her dad, Mark, to send a voice memo to the podcast team, and they discover that he’s working with a download speed of 91 kilobytes per second. For context: the government considers 1 megabit per second insufficient for meaningful online engagement; Mark Brazeau—who works as a school principal—is dealing with less than one hundredth that speed. And, looking beyond the bare minimum of being able to work and learn online, Andrea wonders what else might be possible with better connectivity: “There's this big Indigenous community online,” she says. “Imagine how much more connected we could be as Indigenous peoples across Canada if we had a high functioning internet in the north?“It opens up a world of opportunity for youth in the north to be able to access the same services that we all take for granted in the south” —Mark BuellLater in the episode, we hear from Mark Buell, the regional vice-president for North America at the Internet Society, a non-profit with the goal of securing access to safe and secure internet for everyone in the world. There’s a lot of discussion around how to improve telecommunications in the north. Low-earth-orbit satellites, or LEOS, are one option that shows promise, delivering up to 50 megabits per second. But, according to Buell, the gold standard of connectivity is fibre-optic internet, which delivers 20 times that speed. The problem? Fibre needs infrastructure to operate, and if the infrastructure doesn’t exist, it can cost millions of dollars to build from scratch. “We tended to rely on the private sector to deploy internet access for the first 20 years of the internet. We did a really good job connecting a lot of people to the internet, but it was based on market forces,” he explains. “Canada has some of the highest internet penetration rates in the world. But that's simply because of our geography. The vast majority of Canadians live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border. Where the market-based approach fails is in those communities where there may not be a return on investment for the private sector to deploy access.”Buell speaks about community-led solutions that could help bridge the gap for northern Indigenous populations. He organizes the Indigenous Connectivity Summit, which works to empower Indigenous networkers. After the annual summit, they publish a set of key policy recommendations on how to undertake connectivity projects with Indigenous communities. They argue, "Indigenous voices are critical to conversations about connectivity, especially when the policy outcomes of those conversations will affect Indigenous communities.”In our interview, Buell describes how Ulukhaktok, a small community in the Northwest Territories, is on their way to building their own internet network. Residents completed the Internet Society’s training program and plan to launch their internet service provider as a non-profit. “Indigenous people around the globe have all suffered from the effects of colonialism,” he says. “By connecting to each other via the internet, you create this global community of support to share knowledge and stories.”   

The Right To Be Cold

Climate change threatens human rights. We have a right to a healthy planet. By shining a light on the work of Inuit leader Siila Watt Cloutier, we show how Inuit are Canada’s climate observer's/experts/advocates whose knowledge is key to a meaningful climate adaptation strategy. They are the experts we need to listen to when planning towards a sustainable future. Show NotesCREDITS:Host: Tokunbo Adegbuyi Producer: Ellen Payne SmithAssociate Producer: Sabrina BrathwaiteExecutive Producer: Katie JensenMusic: L CON

Hannan Mohamud on Anti-Black Racism in Education

In our last episode, we discussed how biases in elementary and high school are a barrier to equity for black students—but the conversation doesn’t end there. Hannan Mohamud is a law student at the University of Ottawa involved in anti-racist activism on campus, and the co-host of Is This For Real. In October 2020, Hannan spoke out against 34 professors who wrote an open letter in support of a colleague who had used the n-word in class. We reached Hannan to discuss how anti-racism in education is a key part of Canada's commitment to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal Agenda of "Leaving No One Behind."CREDITS:Host: Tokunbo Adegbuyi Producer: Ellen Payne Smith. Associate Producer: Sabrina Brathwaite. Executive Producer: Katie JensenMusic: L CON  

The Learning Curve

Black students in Canada have higher dropout rates, suspensions and expulsions than their peers. In the latest episode of No Little Plans, we’re asking: how can we make education in Canada more equitable?Show NotesThe killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a worldwide movement in 2020, inspiring millions to take to the streets to protest the scourge of anti-Black racism. And yet many Canadians still see anti-Black racism as solely an American concern. But make no mistake: it’s deeply ingrained in our society, too. And for many Black Canadians, institutional racism starts in the classroom. According to a UN report, Black students in Canada have disproportionately high dropout, expulsion and suspension rates, and they’re more likely to be streamed out of academic programs.The quality of education received by Black students has an impact on their access to future employment and income reports the UN’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.Racism isn’t explicitly mentioned in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, but equitable education is—and you can’t talk about that subject without first looking racial discrimination. In this episode, No Little Plans’ new host Tokunbo Adegbuyi examines the barriers that Black students face in education. Adegbuyi, who lives in Edmonton, has spent the past several years working children and youth in the social sector, mostly in public schools. “Seeing this issue from both sides, as a Black kid who grew up in Edmonton, and then as a pseudo-authority figure in a school,” he says, “students of colour have a different, often tougher, experience in these spaces. And they need advocates.”“It takes a toll on you to always hear, ‘Prove it, prove it, prove it…’ We don't get justice. We have to fight for it.”- Charline GrantIn the episode, we interview Charline Grant, a Black mother of three from Woodbridge, Ontario. Grant describes how she first became involved in advocacy when her eldest son, Ziphion, began experiencing unfair treatment from teachers as early as Grade 2. “When white kids do it, we hear they're articulate. They’re assertive,” she says. When Black kids do, they're aggressive.” By the time he’d entered high school, Grant says, Ziphion was being over-policed by authority figures. One time, he and his friends were approached by a staff member and chided for not wearing the school uniform. His white friends got off easy, she says, while Ziphion, who wasn’t given the opportunity to tell his version of events, was suspended for two days  After much lobbying from Grant and other parents, the suspension was expunged from Ziphion’s record and the school board issued a letter of apology. “We still went through that trauma. We still had an experience. And other students are going through it,” she says.“There are assumptions teachers make about the capacity of some students to do work in particular subject areas. [As a society,] we build these stereotypes and teachers will teach to the stereotypes,” - Dr. Carl JamesDr. Carl Everton James, a professor of education and the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora at York University, has been studying the inequity in Canada’s education system for many years. We spoke to him about his landmark 2017 research study, in which he consulted with 374 parents, teachers and administrators—80 per cent of them Black—and collected Toronto District School Board data on suspension rates, post-secondary acceptance, special education needs, and what sort of classes Black students are attending in high school. In the end, he discovered that Black students were twice as likely as white students to be enrolled in non-academic programs—the ones that don’t lead to college or university.This is due to a system called streaming, in which the school decides which stream of courses a student should take. Different streams lead to different post-secondary paths, which in turn lead to different income-earning opportunities. “We're talking about a society that reproduces these kinds of stereotypes. The idea of who is going to be good at math versus who's going to be good at science,” James says. “We can officially do away with streaming, but if stereotypes of certain groups exist in our society, they're going to be streamed.” He describes an incident he heard during his study in which a Black student and Asian student were chatting during math class, and the teacher immediately assumed the Black student was asking the Asian student for help. In fact, it was the other way around.“[The Ottawa Catholic District School Board] approved a huge, huge budget to purchase diverse resources for our schools to reflect the diverse racial identities of students and staff within our board. This is really critical to fostering anti-racist education."- Mante MolepoThroughout the episode, the subject of bias keeps coming up—how it acts as a filter through which we see the world, through which an educator might see their students. How does a student succeed if they’re not expected to succeed? To navigate those questions, Adegbuyi speaks to Mante Molepo, a lawyer and the equity and diversity advisor for the Ottawa Catholic District School Board.One of the main problems she identifies is the relative lack of Black representation among educators and administrators in many Canadian school boards. She points out that, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, a Black student is more likely to graduate high school or go on to post-secondary education when they’ve had Black teachers—when they’ve seen themselves reflected in authority figures. “When you have Black administrators and system leaders, they’re able to implement an education system that is more likely to be anti-racist,” she says.And that representation in leadership, she argues, needs to start not just with the people implementing those systems, but with the ones creating them. “Who gets to write [anti-racism] policies? Who gets to interpret them?...When we look at how policies are being developed, do we have Black communities consulting and providing their input?” she asks. As for representation, she points out that one way communities can help ensure equity at their institutions is to elect Black trustees to the school board. These are people who approve multi-million-dollar budgets, who guide the direction of schools, who work closely with superintendents and education directors. “School board trustees, by acknowledging anti-Black racism and really being intentional about addressing it, they can really give direction to the school board to implement an anti-racist education.”