Ten Years Later, the UN Comes Back to Listen

In a kitchen in Saint-Michel, a father rereads, for the third time, a sheet of paper next to the sugar bowl. Three sentences, no more. He was told he would have two minutes to speak.

His neighbour from the third floor hands him a pencil. She is the one who looked after his son on the nights he worked. "Add that you weren't alone."

He hesitates, then writes at the bottom, smaller. When they tried to take my boy away, the whole building came to speak up for us. In the next room, the little one is asleep. He doesn't know yet that his story will travel all the way to Geneva.

(This scene is invented. What follows is not.)

Stories like his are what the UN has come to hear. Ashwini K.P. is the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism.

From September 28 to October 9, she is travelling across Canada: Ottawa, Quebec City, Montreal, Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto.

She is meeting federal and provincial authorities. She is also meeting members of racialized groups, community organizations and researchers.

She will share her preliminary observations on October 9 in Ottawa. She will present her report to the Human Rights Council in June 2027.

It is not the first time. From October 17 to 21, 2016, a UN group of experts on people of African descent visited Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax and Montreal.

Its report concluded that slavery, segregation and marginalization had left Canada with a legacy of anti-Black racism.

It noted that in Montreal, African Canadians had the highest poverty rates among visible minorities. In Toronto, children of African descent were heavily overrepresented among those in the care of the Children's Aid Society.

Steps followed. In 2018, Canada recognized the International Decade for People of African Descent. In 2024, it welcomed the adoption of a second decade, running to 2034.

In Ontario, starting in 2016, more than 800 members of the Black community helped build a practice framework, One Vision One Voice. It is meant to help children's aid societies better serve Black families.

But one recommendation is still waiting: to apologize and consider reparations for slavery.

And one question remains. When a family falters, do we see it as a danger, or as a family to support?

Entrusting a child to a whole village rather than to suspicion alone: perhaps that is where repair begins.

An author at the University of Victoria who has written about Ubuntu remembers those who raised him:

A child carried by a whole street is never alone before those who judge the family. That village starts on our own landing.