This election, we are publishing regular updates with speaking points and facts to help you talk to your friends, family members and co-workers about racism and immigration.
Often it’s hard to have these difficult conversations, so we prepared a step by step guide to anti-racist conversations to help you.
- Election Reality Check 1: Let’s Get Louder – For the next 40 days, we will be hearing more lies, half-truths and empty promises from politicians. This is why for the next 40 days, we will be sending you regular Election Reality Checks to help you cut through the noise. These Reality Checks will be full of facts and talking points you can use to respond to politicians who will try to make us blame migrants for low wages, inadequate services and the high cost of living.
- Election Reality Check 2: Refugees Explained – 9 key facts about refugees that you need to know.
- Election Reality Check 3: Talking About Blackface – Racialized people, particularly children, are hurt when they see the Prime Minister in Blackface. These images are reminders of all the ways in which they are seen as inferior, been excluded, or tormented. But this is about a lot more than feelings of hurt, this is about systematic laws, policies and culture that underwrite Canada, and how they must change.
- Election Reality Check 4: Climate Crisis, Racism and Migration – It is no coincidence that the politicians refusing to act on climate change are the same ones drumming up hatred against migrants. Those who have brought us to the brink of climate catastrophe want to evade their responsibility by selling us ineffective individualistic solutions and put the blame elsewhere. To win action on climate, we must reject the politics of division and racism.
- Election Reality Check 5: Immigration Detention – While migrants are framed as criminals by politicians and the media, the truth is many migrants live in daily fear of being imprisoned without charges or trial, often indefinitely. The threat of detention and deportation keeps migrants from asserting basic rights. Canada’s immigration detention system is unjust, deadly and growing.
- Election Reality Check 6: What they say vs What they mean on Immigration Policy – During this election you’ll hear many statements and promises about immigration. Some will be explicitly racist, most will be based on half-truths, and all will fall short of what we really need. Here are some common refrains you will hear, and some points you can use to understand and challenge them.
- Election Reality Check 7: Quebec’s Law 21 Explained – Under the guise of secularism, Quebec’s Law 21 is whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia. This strategy is not unique to Quebec; it is part of a broader attack on migrants through provincial and federal laws across the country. There is widespread resistance to Law 21 in Quebec. We must amplify that resistance and reject all forms of racism that serve to distract and divide us.
- Election Reality Check 8: Thank a Migrant Farmworker: We must build communities that prioritize the needs and humanity of migrant farm workers as centrally as our communities rely on their labour. From clean drinking water to safe housing, accessible public transportation, healthcare, full and equal labour and immigration rights, we must build communities in which migrant farm workers and their families can thrive.
- Election Reality Check 9: Affordability, Work and Wealth: During this election campaign, almost every party has expressed concern for people “struggling to make ends meet” or pledged to make life “more affordable”. Most of the ‘solutions’ on offer, like tax cuts and credits, fail to redistribute wealth and make the economy work for the majority of us. Here are some points you can use to challenge your friends and family members to demand better.
- Final Reality Check: After the Election: While it may seem difficult to impact what happens inside parliament, we have and we must continue to build our power outside it. Let us coordinate in our workplaces and our communities by talking to people, and winning them over to a shared vision of justice for all, one person at a time, one meeting at a time. And as we come together around issues that matter to each of us the most, we must connect and build links with others here and around the world, towards a common platform of decent work, universal services, permanent status, climate justice, and an end to displacement and discrimination.