Speech to Niagara Falls City Council Against Merging Anti-Racism and Diversity & Inclusion Committees

 Dear Mayor and Councillors,

I am Saleh Waziruddin from the Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association. I lived in Niagara Falls for 10 years until a few years ago, the most time I've lived anywhere in Niagara.

Please do not merge the anti-racism and diversity & inclusion committees. Having one committee instead of two means less time spent on anti-racism, and you can't do more for anti-racism by giving it less time. Even a sub-committee won't have the time that a full committee will.

But the merger will do even worse than cut the time spent on anti-racism. There is a mistaken idea that diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism are all part of the same set. But there is a big difference. As a former elected official in Niagara had said about himself 100% correctly that he was the first Polish-Canadian elected to his position, and while that may very well be diversity and it may very well be inclusion, it is definitely not anti-racism. It's an important achievement but anti-racism is something else altogether.

This is important because a merged committee will have people representing all kinds of diversity and not just lived experience with racism. This means that anti-racism recommendations will need to be first approved by people who don't have the lived experience before they even get to you. It's an unnecessary barrier to get you vital advice you are seeking.

There was a trend before the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for municipalities to fold anti-racism committees into one broader diversity committee a catch-all committee. That trend was reversed after the murder of George Floyd when cities, including lower-tier municipalities, saw that they too have a role in anti-racism. The proposal tonight will move things backwards.

But actually the need for more attention to anti-racism, not less, is even more acute now in Niagara Falls and in Niagara in general. The portion of Niagara Falls' population who are visible minorities, which by the government's definition doesn't even include Indigenous people, has gone up by 1/3 since the last census: it was 12.7% in 2016, and the 2021 census shows 16.5% for Niagara Falls. The portion of the Black population increased by over a third from 2.9% to 4.1%. The South Asian proportion has nearly doubled to 2.5% alone. We have Councillor Mona Patel, the first BIPOC Niagara Falls councillor I know of since Burr Plato, who was elected over 100 years ago, and the first female BIPOC city councillor here. We need even more time spent on anti-racism than before.

We in the municipalities of Niagara have been falling further behind actually on anti-racism while the rest of Canada and the world is marching ahead. There are specific lower-tier municipality anti-racism measures that other cities in Ontario have been doing that our residents are missing out on.

Merging the committees would obviously cut the time spent specifically on anti-racism and it would water down the work of the committee by mixing in people who don't have lived experience with racism. Please keep the committees separate as you originally decided to do when there was a proposal for just one diversity committee instead of a dedicated anti-racism advisory committee.

You can't do more with less, less time, no matter what the synergies are. This is going to be seen by the world as a step backwards when we need to be moving forwards.