When I was asked to contribute a piece to Concordia University's student newspaper The Link on the role my African-Canadian identity played in my participation in Magna International’s The Next Great Prime Minister competition in 2006, I first remembered a passage from Norman Snider’s 1985 book The Changing of the Guard. In one passage, then Liberal Party leadership candidate Jean Chrétien was accosted by two rank-and-file Toronto Liberals—one of Portuguese roots, the other Jamaican—protesting the dismissal of their ethnic communities’ concerns by the party’s head honchos. “[Can you] sit down and assure us,” demanded the Portuguese gentleman, “that we are going to get a piece, a small piece of Canada for everybody?”
According to Mr. Snider, the problem was not the political parties’ prejudice. Leading Liberals in particular would have been delighted to welcome a Greek, Haitian or Vietnamese rising star into the highest echelons of political power. Unfortunately, the pool of ethnic volunteers for such top-tier positions was painfully small and hence largely untapped. The cultural and social cohesion of ethnic groups in Canada makes even their most qualified members reluctant to enter the political arena, lest they lose touch with their origins. “By and large,” wrote Snider, “multiculturalism meant that Canada’s ethnic communities…huddled in on themselves. To date, their bright young men and women had not taken the path out of the neighborhoods and into the corridors of power. […] After all, such a path successfully negotiated would take a man far from his roots, and few seemed willing to attempt it.” This, it seems, is as true today as it was in 1984.
In August 2005, when I first heard of The Next Great Prime Minister from a friend of my mother’s, I jumped at the chance to submit and defend my own proposals for political reform in the marketplace of ideas. I advocated striking down trade barriers between the provinces and reforming our system of government to elect the Prime Minister separately from Parliament. Good ideas, or so I thought at the time; but they had nothing to do with the peculiar concerns of the Black community. Why?
Years of avid reading had taught me how rarely Canada’s political establishment tackles issues of specific concern to ethnic communities. Earlier in The Changing of the Guard, Mr. Snider noted the paternalistic stance the Liberal Party in particular took towards minority groups—“helping them with immigration matters, giving them grants to maintain their distinctive cultures” and so on. Yet beyond this old time religion, little real political clout accrued to ethnic Canadians from their Liberal loyalties. On those rare occasions when political heavy hitters do address minority concerns, they usually do so superficially and clumsily at best. In one of The Next Great Prime Minister’s preliminary rounds, I was asked what needed to be done to stop the wave of killings plaguing Toronto’s black neighborhoods. As a young black man, surely I would instinctively grasp what drives this fratricidal mayhem, right?
Well, actually, wrong. At the time, anyone’s guess was as good as mine. Yet my questioners seemed to assume that as the sole Black finalist—and quite possibly the sole Black contestant—in the competition, I must be their “go-to guy”, their resident expert on all things pertaining to blackness. I will probably never know whether any of my fairer-hued competitors were asked that question.
It bears notice that beyond Toronto’s murder rate, ethnic issues played no role in the debates around which the competition revolved once I advanced to the final round in January 2006. We focused, rather, on matters such as the health care system, the war in Afghanistan, and Iran’s nuclear program. In truth, that was just the way I liked it. I’m not sure that politicians should be focusing their attention on dealing with specific ethnic grievances. In my view, their energies—and our tax dollars—are generally better spent addressing issues that concern all Canadians, regardless of cultural origin.
Since participating in The Next Great Prime Minister, my congratulators have often gushed that I could be the first Black Prime Minister of Canada. I don’t doubt this possibility, and I refuse to rule it out. Yet I believe that the various branches of the African Diaspora have placed too much emphasis on politics as a means of achieving social equality. Historically, the minority groups that made the fastest rise from poverty and persecution to prosperity and power were those who embraced education and built up their own business and professional classes, as well as those who maintained strong, stable families. Those who prefer to dispatch swarms of politicians to the citadels of government in order to dole out fiscal goodies to their communities, while ignoring aberrant rates of school dropouts and absentee fatherhood and a dearth of entrepreneurial ambition, are doomed to be left behind. Without tackling those problems, even electing a million Marlene Jenningses or Yolande Jameses—or Barack Obamas, for that matter—will never bring us to Dr. King’s proverbial Promised Land.
