At 12:16 Sunday afternoon, John Tory’s staff sent an email to the press advising that he would be making an “important announcement” in his office at 2:00. And, for the first time in at least a couple weeks, the mayor did not disappoint.
“I am announcing today my intention, at the next meeting of the Police Services Board on June 18, to seek the permanent cancellation of carding once and for all,” he declared, reversing a position he’d taken as recently as last Wednesday, when following a press conference by prominent Torontonians calling for an end to the practise (see open letter at bottom), he affirmed a wait-and-see approach to reforms.
“I will also be seeking to further the work already done by Chief [Mark] Saunders, with a goal of putting in place strict measures dealing with the treatment of collected data,” he said. “I think most of this as it relates to random encounters with innocent citizens could in fact be eliminated.”
Given that carding was the act of stopping and documenting random individuals — disproportionately, young black and brown men — and putting their information into a police database where it would be retained indefinitely, this was pretty darn significant. And it showed that in the face of a critical mass of opposition, Tory was capable of allowing his thinking to evolve.
“The personal stories I’ve heard in recent months and even before, the words laden with deeply felt emotion, have been building up in my conscience and they have stuck with me. And the impact has been magnified by my very longstanding, close, and mutually respectful relationship with our black community,” he said.
“And so after great personal reflection and many discussions, highlighted by a very candid, thoughtful discussion with a number of people including Desmond Cole and others, I have concluded that time has gone on too long, and that it was time for me to say, ‘Enough.’ It was time to acknowledge that there is no real way to fix a practise which has come to be regarded as illegitimate, disrespectful, and hurtful.”
He said he made the decision in a taxi to the Edmonton airport upon leaving the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ annual conference, when he told his chief of staff that the only way to make progress on the issue would be to start over on a new policy with a clean slate.
This of course doesn’t mean that interactions between police and those they’re sworn to protect will magically improve overnight. This doesn’t even mean the chief will agree with the new direction that Tory will push the board to take. Decades of institutional racism and tremendously strained relationships won’t be transformed with a simple change of policy. But to have a mayor standing firmly against a practise widely viewed as the formal entrenchment of racial profiling is no small thing at all. In fact, it is huge and necessary.
Jonathan Goldsbie
Councillor Paula Fletcher, who just happened to be at City Hall on Sunday cleaning up her office, praised Tory’s change of heart: “This is what a leader does: looks at the situation, reassesses. And he’s made a very big announcement for the city of Toronto today.”
The Ward 30 (Toronto-Danforth) rep said she appreciates when the mayor rises above his advisors, one of whom recently wondered aloud why only black people were opposed to carding.
“So Mayor Tory, when he listens to the, call them the ‘elders’ in this city, when he listens to the communities in this city, I think he makes good decisions. If he’s listening to his internal staff, maybe he doesn’t make the best decisions.”
