Five provinces across Canada celebrated Family Day February 17.
Canadians were encouraged to spend time with their families and to promote the value of family. Yet, many families in Canada remain on the outside of those deemed valuable.
In Toronto, a Family Day March in support of pipeline opponents in Wet’suwet’en territory in northern BC, drew hundreds of people. At a time when the RCMP has carried out raids on Indigenous blockades – and arrested Wet’suwet’en matriarchs while they were in ceremony for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls – it remains all-too-clear that Canadian government policies pay lip service to the value of families.
A recent report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator reveals that Indigenous women make up 42 per cent of the federal women inmate population in Canada. Many of them have children. With generations of Indigenous families displaced, and while the effects of residential schools continue to be lived out in the number of Indigenous children in the child welfare system, whose families matter on Family Day?
Federal prosecutors continue to fight a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Indigenous children, effectively denying compensation for underfunding First Nations in the child welfare system.
Canada’s commitment to families also rings hollow when it comes to the treatment of refugees and migrants.
In November, statistics showed that 118 children were being held in immigration detention in Canada.
In 2013, the first words spoken by two-year-old Alpha Anawa, a Black, Cameroonian child born in immigration detention were “radio check,” words he heard the guards say at shift change.
Canada’s policies of family separation are felt more broadly throughout the immigration system.
In 2018, after passing through 31 homes by the time he was 19, Abdoul Abdi was incarcerated on numerous charges and faced deportation. He is the father of a young daughter.
Abdi and his sister, Fatuma, arrived in Nova Scotia as child refugees from Somalia, and were soon made permanent wards of the state. There was no policy in place in Nova Scotia to assure that non-citizen children in the care of the state received citizenship, and Abdoul and Fatuma were left without this basic right.
Abdi was spared deportation after a successful court decision and a national advocacy effort led by Black communities across Canada.
However, uncounted numbers of refugee children and former wards of the state, face similar situations. Canada has a long history of anti-Black immigration and deportation policies.
In 2017, Beverley Braham, a Jamaican-born woman married to a Canadian citizen, was scheduled for deportation when she was 31 weeks pregnant. While that order was successfully delayed, Braham received another deportation notice when her baby was four months old, and while she had been in and out of hospital following a high-risk pregnancy.
Braham was eventually permitted to return to Canada, but for the majority of families facing deportation and family separation, there is no reprieve.
In 2016, it was revealed that there was massive corruption in how files on Roma immigrants were being processed. Last week, Roksana Hajrizi’s mother, Celina, marked her 23 anniversary in Canada. She is scheduled for imminent deportation in a case complicated by negligence and error. Her husband has already been deported.
Roksana and her sister Camilla, who came to the country as children in 1997, faced deportation as well but were recently granted a reprieve on humanitarian grounds. (Hajrizi is queer.)
Last August, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland acknowledged the historical and ongoing oppression of Romany people, particularly Roma women, on Romani Genocide Remembrance Day. She stated: “We vow to never let such atrocities to be committed against anyone anywhere.”
Even with her own reprieve, Hajziri continues to fight for the safety of her mother. In December, Hajrizi camped in a tent across the street from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office for days in freezing temperatures to draw attention to her family’s case.
These cases are known because they got attention, unlike the nameless thousands we don’t hear about. Successful advocacy shows that when we are not complacent, we can resist state attacks on communities that have been subjected to ongoing histories of dispossession.
But for Family Day to be meaningful, Canadians must resist discriminatory family separation policies of all kinds.
Robyn Maynard is a Toronto-based writer and author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to The Present (Fernwood, 2017). El Jones is the Poet Laureate of Nova Scotia and author of the forthcoming book, Canada Is So Police (Gaspereau).
