Diversity increasing among Niagara’s elected officials (St. Catharines Standard)

https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news/council/2022/10/26/diversity-increasing-among-niagaras-elected-officials.html 

Diversity increasing among Niagara’s elected officials

Nine women will serve on regional council

By Allan BennerStandard Reporter

Wed., Oct. 26, 2022timer4 min. read

updateArticle was updated 4 hrs ago

“We did it. We broke the eight barrier,” said Diana Huson, laughing after counting the number of women who will serve on Niagara Region council for the next four years.

“That’s wonderful.”

Huson, who was re-elected as Pelham’s regional councillor in Monday’s election, said it’s the first time regional council has included more than eight women serving their communities as both mayors and regional councillors.

However, she said the nine women elected still falls slightly below the minimum representation targeted by the United Nations, which recommends at least 30 per cent representation by women “to have some equity in terms of having a voice on a government body.”

“We’re at 28 (per cent). Oh, we’re so close,” she said.

Huson said that UN target should be 50 per cent, “but it just seems like such an unattainable number, and I don’t know why.”

She will be joined on regional council by Laura Ip and Haley Bateman representing St. Catharines, Joyce Morocco from Niagara Falls, Leanna Villella from Welland, Andrea Kaiser from Niagara-on-the-Lake and Michelle Seaborn from Grimsby, as well as mayors Sandra Easton from Lincoln and Cheryl Ganann from West Lincoln.

Including municipal councils across Niagara, there could be as many as 41 women elected, depending on the outcome of a tied vote between Angie Desmarais and Eric Beauregard, who each received 342 votes in Ward 2 in Port Colborne.

There were previously 35 women serving at the municipal and regional levels in Niagara, not including school boards.

“This is the benefit of having a women’s advisory committee, even if you don’t have the distribution in terms of people in seats you still have a strong voice in choosing policy and even interacting with some of important actors — senior administrative leaders of departments,” said Huson, who led the committee during this recent term of council.

The committee encouraged more women to run for office, including recommending establishing a Niagara’s Seat at the Table program with funding from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which set up a series of workshops to address barriers that women and gender diverse people face when running for municipal office.

Niagara District Council of Women played a role as well, hosting an online forum for female regional council candidates.

The organization’s past-president, Gracia Janes, said it’s “good to see more women” elected to office.

“We thought they were wonderful,” Janes said, referring to candidates who participated in the forum held in late September.

“They were brilliant. They were dedicated, they were knowledgeable. They weren’t just pie in the sky.”

The outcome of the election, she said, demonstrates that “we’re pushing things and we’re being accepted.”

“The public wants us. We’re making progress.”

Saleh Waziruddin from Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association is thrilled with the election results across the region as well, noting at least two new candidates from racial minorities were elected to office, including “significant victories” by Sharmila Setaram representing Ward 3 in Welland and Mona Patel who was elected to Niagara Falls city council.

He said Setaram, who was born in Canada of Indo-Guyanese heritage, has a history of being involved in equity issues.

And Patel, an immigrant from Southeast Asia, is one of very few BIPOC representatives to have been elected in Niagara Falls in decades.

Setaram, the past-president of Amnesty International Canada and former chair of Equal Voice — a national bipartisan organization that encourages women to run for elected office — said she has “always been a human rights advocate and champion working on these issues in the community, and at a national level looking at policies and procedures, behind the scenes and also on the front lines at marches and protests.”

She said it has been at least 20 years since a woman has been elected in the ward she represents, and “it’s my understanding, too, that I’m the first person of colour to be elected to serve on city council here in Welland.

“It is incredible to win against incumbents. I had a huge uphill battle,” she said.

Meanwhile, Waziruddin said most candidates who failed to understand issues of racism and diversity did not win the seats they were vying for, adding the association published information about candidates affiliated with political parties that have racist platforms, and with few exceptions those candidates were defeated.

Others who supported the association’s efforts to address system racism were elected, he said.

Although many more strong candidates did not win their elections, Waziruddin said some of them — such as Tapo Chimbganda who ran for St. Catharines city council and regional council candidate Trecia McLennon — fared extremely well for their first time running at the municipal level.

“I’ve told people who have run and lost that many people get in the second time,” he said.

Huson said she’s hopeful the diversity among Niagara’s political leaders will increase in years to come.

“I feel like it’s a generational thing,” she said. “As a society we’re evolving in terms of our values and I think we’re getting there.”

She said the diversity of candidates who opted to run for office is an indication of those changing values.

“If you look at especially St. Catharines and the diversity of the candidates and the different voices they represented, I don’t know if we’ve ever had a slate like that before, and it really speaks to a reflection on who is representative of our population and who feels that they’re under-represented in terms of having a voice and wanting to have a seat at the table, per se,” she said.

“Just the fact that we had those people come out and realistically saw themselves as having an opportunity to participate in political discord and where we’re taking our government and who we’re representing, I think that’s a huge accomplishment.”

Allan Benner is a St. Catharines-based reporter with the Standard. Reach him via email: allan.benner@niagaradailies.com

Anti-racism in smaller cities and towns (Talking Radical radio show)

https://soundcloud.com/scott-neigh-talking-radical/anti-racism-in-smaller-cities-and-towns

or https://mediacoop.ca/node/119105

Governance 

Oct 18, 2022

Anti-racism in smaller cities and towns

by 

Scott Neigh

Anti-racism in smaller cities and towns by Scott Neigh -- Talking Radical Radio

Saleh Waziruddin is an anti-racist activist in St. Catharines, Ontario, and an executive committee member of the Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association (NRARA). Scott Neigh interviews him about doing locally-focused grassroots anti-racism work in a place like Niagara – comprised of smaller cities, towns, and rural areas – and how it differs from anti-racism in larger cities.

Waziruddin was born in Montreal, but grew up mostly outside of Canada. As a Canadian citizen attending university in Pittsburgh in the US, he was wary of becoming politically involved. But in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, he was drawn into grassroots political work in the face of the kinds of racism, Islamophobia, and harassment driven with particular intensity in those years by the national security states of Western countries. In one way or another, he has been engaged in anti-racism work ever since. In 2006, he was barred from returning to the US, so he settled in Canada, in southern Ontario’s Niagara Region.

If you were to judge based on what shows up in the mainstream media, you would think, in Ontario, that racism is mostly a problem in the larger cities, like Toronto and its environs. But according to Waziruddin, things are actually worse in smaller centres – the issue just does not get the same attention. In recent years, he has particularly seen this because ballooning housing costs have led many Black, Indigenous, and racialized (or BIPOC) people to move from the Greater Toronto Area to Niagara, and he said that when they get there, “they’re experiencing racism that they’ve never seen before, at levels they have never seen before and never imagined.”

The NRARA was founded four years ago. Up to that point, there had been a different organization doing anti-racist work in Niagara. However, as a result of anti-Black racism within that organization, three individuals left and founded the NRARA, and the original organization soon disbanded. (Waziruddin was not one of those three founders, but has been active in the organization since its first meeting.)

Partly as a consequence of these circumstances, the NRARA has been committed from the start to being led by BIPOC people themselves. Waziruddin pointed to “behaviours that happen in activist organizations that are exhausting to BIPOC people,” including “our experiences being invalidated” and various things that “derail the discussion” but have “nothing to do with the work of countering white supremacy.” The NRARA has clear guidelines for conduct that are presented at the start of each meeting, and an organizational culture in which “you will be called out if you do this kind of behaviour that’s derailing the meeting, derailing our work, and has proven exhausting to BIPOC members.”

Under the broad banner of anti-racist activism, different organizations can have a wide range of goals and approaches. For the NRARA, it means a quite specific set of things. It means, for one thing, supporting individuals who are facing direct experiences of racism. And it means pushing local institutions to change their policies and practices in anti-racist ways. Waziruddin said, “The direction we’re going, we hope, is actually challenging white supremacy.”

The work of supporting individuals who are facing racism varies a lot, depending on the circumstances. In a recent case, a Black woman in Fort Erie received anonymous letters threatening to burn her house down, supposedly because of loud music, and the NRARA held a public rally in front of her house, took up space, and made it clear that her neighbours from across the Region would support her. A lot of the time, though, it is much lower profile – for instance, just having one or a few people quietly accompany the individual in risky contexts in their neighbourhood or when they are dealing with organizations that have been treating them in racist ways.

Challenging local institutions has meant pushing for police reform and for changes in the practices of municipal governments. He said, “The police and many other institutions in Niagara are far behind what other places are doing” when it comes to anti-racism. To push this work forward, the NRARA does things like delegating, lobbying, participating in official processes, and doing media work, as well as participating in protests and similar activities.

When it comes to police reform, Waziruddin contrasts the NRARA’s efforts with two other broad approaches. On the one hand, he is quite dismissive of how some community groups make minimal or no demands for change and act as willing participants in police public relations efforts. On the other hand, he says that while he is in favour of police abolition in the long term, the group is also open to a wider range of reforms in the meantime than some abolitionist groups. He said, “We are for both small changes and big changes, because we believe the small changes are what you need to build up the support to where you can get the bigger changes.”

Currently, they are making demands for an end to racial profiling and to police involvement in mental health and wellness checks, as well in favour of the use of body-worn cameras and a more robust system of locally-controlled civilian oversight. In the past, they have won changes like the disaggregation of the reporting of hate crime data. In the near future, they will be releasing a report outlining the disproportionate use of force by police in Niagara against Black and Indigenous people, which they say is even more stark than in places like Toronto.

Beyond their work for police reform, a lot of the NRARA’s work is focused on local governments. Niagara has two-tier municipal government, with responsibilities split between the Regional Municipality of Niagara and multiple city, town, and township governments within it. Waziruddin said, “We are focusing a lot on what municipalities can do because municipalities and cities do have a role to play in anti-racism. And it kind of lets them off the hook if you focus only on provincial and federal action.”

One of the NRARA’s key demands is that each municipality have a citizen advisory committee specifically focused on anti-racism – as well as an LGBTQ+ committee and other committees focused on other issues – rather than a catch-all diversity committee. Waziruddin said that folding anti-racism advisory committees into broader diversity and inclusion committees is something that is happening across North America. And he said that while “diversity and inclusion are very important,” in tasking a single committee with the entire gamut of such issues, very often “you don’t get the time to focus on anti-racism.” And this is in a context where “a lot of municipal governments don’t want to touch anything with the word racism in it.”

The NRARA has succeeded in getting the cities of St. Catherines and Niagara Falls to set up separate anti-racism advisory committees, and are likely to succeed with the Niagara regional government, though that has not happened yet. They also want to see local governments make better use of other tools within their power, like purchasing and hiring policies that will address barriers faced by BIPOC people, and the use of by-laws to respond to racist symbols and harassment.

According to Waziruddin, a key difference in fighting racism in a place like Niagara compared to the big cities is that the latter tend to “have established anti-racism organizations and BIPOC organizations and institutions,” often with paid staff, in a way that Niagara just does not. Despite the severity of racism in the region, in terms of anti-racism work, “We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the organizations, we don’t have the institutions. We don’t have the funding. … We have a bigger need, I would say, but we don’t have the resources to meet those needs.”

Nonetheless, he is optimistic about what grassroots groups can accomplish. He encourages people who want to do anti-racism work in areas similar to Niagara to start by getting a few like-minded people together and focusing on those institutions that pretty much all places have – local government, school boards, and police – by using the example of reforms that have been won elsewhere as a starting point. He said, “You can even just simply take what’s being done in let’s say Toronto, or Peel, or Brampton in Ontario, or the big cities in other provinces, and say, look, they have this, why can’t we have this, and push for that kind of policy.”

As well, he encourages groups to make themselves publically visible online, so that people who experience racism in their area might get in touch to seek support. When they do, he said, you should support them – partly because it is just the right thing to do to help people in need, but also as a way to build the organization. He continued, “If you get more and more volunteers working on those kinds of situations, you may find that one case where the person wants to go public and where it’s really a compelling case where people will get it. And then you can use that to change people’s understanding of white supremacy and racism in your area.”

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact scottneigh@talkingradical.ca to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Ubahnverleih / Wikimedia

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

Advocates say minority candidates face uphill battle to win elections (Toronto Star, St. Catharines Standard)

(https://www.thestar.com/nd/news/niagara-region/2022/10/07/advocates-say-minority-candidates-face-uphill-battle-to-win-elections.html or https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news/niagara-region/2022/10/07/advocates-say-minority-candidates-face-uphill-battle-to-win-elections.html)

Advocates say minority candidates face uphill battle to win elections

By Allan BennerStandard Reporter

Fri., Oct. 7, 2022timer4 min. read

While there may be greater diversity among Niagara’s municipal candidates than in previous elections, anti-racism advocates say they would have liked to see more.

At least 17 candidates from throughout Niagara are from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of colour) communities, running for political office at all levels of municipal government in the Oct. 24 election hoping to be elected in a region that currently has no apparent visible minorities serving on Niagara Region or local municipal councils.

“It’s certainly more BIPOC candidates than we’ve seen before, but there’s not enough,” said Saleh Waziruddin from Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association. “It still doesn’t represent the community.”

He said there has been a significant change in Niagara’s demographics in the past few years, with a lot of people moving in from the Greater Toronto Area “including a lot of BIPOC people.”

Although Waziruddin said region specific census data on race has yet to be published, data from other sources shows an “increase in visible minorities in Niagara, especially for black, Middle Eastern and Latino people.”

Based on that data, he said anti-racism association members expected to see “an even higher percentage of BIPOC candidates, “and it’s still far short.”

When all political representatives are Caucasian, Waziruddin said they do not represent the full demographics of the communities they serve, and “it get’s even worse because a lot of boards, commissions and other bodies are drawn from those elected officials.”

“Without having any measures to ensure diversity there, you’re stuck with drawing from a non-diverse pool.”

Operation Black Vote Canada chair Velma Morgan said her organization too has seen an increase in candidates from visible minorities in Niagara and across the province.

While it’s a start, she said even fewer of those candidates are Black, and it’s those candidates her organization is most concerned with — and those candidates face an uphill battle to be elected.

“We love fact that Black Canadians and Ontarians are running, but it’s not the running it’s the winning that we want,” Morgan said. “We want to see them have a seat at the table. We want to see them making decisions for their communities.”

Many of the candidates, Morgan added, also have a great deal to offer with impressive lists of accomplishments in their communities.

“That’s because we have to be three or four times better educated with a long list of resume items and work in the community just to be recognized as a contender,” she said. “We have to prove through our experience and credentials that we have a right to be on a ballot. That’s why they’re so well accomplished.”

Waziruddin said the BIPOC candidates are also facing incumbents, adding to the challenges they will face.

Morgan agreed, saying the major barrier candidates face is incumbency, and her organization has been calling for term limits to help address that barrier.

“If we really want to have city councils that are inclusive and representative … there needs to be some type of term limit, where if you have three terms that’s 12 years. Take a break and if you want to come back after four years, … that’s fine,” she said. “Term limits are the only way we’re going to allow for inclusion and diversity at the municipal level.”

Morgan said many Black candidates also face challenges even putting together the resources they need to run an effective campaign.

“I’m hearing just getting people to volunteer on their campaign is an issue for some of them. Fund raising is also an issue. They need funding for brochures and signs and those are the major things,” Morgan said.

“If they don’t have a network with a lot of resources, how do they get their names out there?”

Waziruddin said voters need to take diversity into consideration when casting their ballots.

“Voters need to consider all the different aspects,” he said. “If there is a BIPOC candidate who is good, they should be worthy of support — even if there is a non BIPOC candidate who is also good. The voters should consider the full make up of the council they’re electing.”

Morgan said Operation Black Vote Canada has seen an increase in Black candidates across the province, after working to encourage Black residents to put their names forward through programs to “demystify” the process.

While she said it’s difficult to definitively determine the race of candidates in all 444 Ontario municipalities, her organization is confident there has been an increase in Black candidates — “not enough, but more than before.”

Waziruddin was also concerned about the responses several candidates provided local newspapers, when asked: “How will you embrace and champion diversity in this role?”

“Some of the candidates are outright hostile to diversity,” he said. “Some of them were outright saying that we don’t need diversity, or they’re opposed to diversity.”

He said the association plans to put together a report in the next few weeks, highlighting the responses politicians provided opposing diversity, while also distributing a questionnaire to candidates to further explore how they feel about Niagara’s changing demographics.

Allan Benner is a St. Catharines-based reporter with the Standard. Reach him via email: allan.benner@niagaradailies.com