National Affairs
Hometown examples would have been better
Claire Hoy
Last week, to honor Black History Month, secretary of state Jason Kenney wrote a newspaper column asking Canadians to recognize the "heroic campaign" by anti-slave activist British MP William Wilberforce in convincing Britain to outlaw the African slave trade in the British Empire 200 years ago this month.

No argument there. It's just that one might have hoped that the minister responsible for "Canadian identity-" whatever that means, exactly - might have used a homegrown example of anti-slavery heroism rather than - as is so often the case with Canadians - looking abroad for examples.

As historian Jack G r a n a t s t e i n lamented in his 1998 book, Who Killed Canadian History?, "Canada must be one of the few nations in the world ...that does not make an effort to teach its history positively and thoroughly to its young people." Here's a perfect example. The first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire happened right here in Canada. In 1793 - 14 years before King George III gave royal assent to British legislation to abolish the African slave trade, and 40 years before the practice actually ended there - John Graves Simcoe, Upper Canada's first lieutenant-governor, pushed through, "An Act to Prevent the Further Introduction of Slaves and to Limit the Term of Forced Servitude within This Province."

Simcoe wanted to ban slavery outright, but since onethird of the Legislature's members owned slaves, it got watered down. Even so, it was revolutionary at the time, and bolstered the work of Wilberforce and others. Simcoe's law allowed existing slaves to remain in bondage until their death, but banned importation of new slaves into Upper Canada (although slaves continued to be bought and sold in Toronto until 1806). It also offered freedom to all slaves who were brought in or who came to Upper Canada, and decreed that children of slaves born after 1793 would be freed after their twenty-fifth birthday, and their children would be born free.

By 1810, there were only about two dozen slaves left in what is now Ontario.

France had outlawed slavery earlier - although Napoleon brought it back - but in 1689 Louis XIV, hoping to encourage population growth in the colonies, issued Le Code Noir, allowing slavery in the colonies. When the British took over New France in 1763, there were more than 1,000 black slaves there, plus a large number of aboriginal slaves.

At the time - something else not taught in Canadian schools - most aboriginal tribes routinely enslaved men, women and children captured during inter-tribal wars. The 47th Article of Capitulation in the Treaty of Paris, ceding control of Canada to the British, guaranteed the maintenance of slavery in British North America. A 1792 bill to abolish slavery in Lower Canada (Quebec) - one year before Simcoe's legislation - was defeated.

Canadians should be proud of our early participation in the Underground Railroad, helping tens of thousands of American blacks - both slaves and "freemen" escaping from punitive legislation -settle in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes.

But myths persist. For one thing, U.S. slavery was not confined to the southern states. Nor was slavery strictly a white, North American phenomena. Slavery was widely practiced in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. More African slaves were shipped to South America than to North America. And as the current Economist magazine reports, "it is an awkward fact that the (slave) traffic could not have existed without African chiefs and traders ... when the Europeans arrived the slave trade and slavery were already integral parts of local tribal economies."

As Canadians, we too often adopt morally superior attitudes toward our American neighbors. True, blacks who escaped to Canada in the 1800s enjoyed a better life here, but it wasn't exactly Eden re-visited.

In the 1850s, for example, The Common Schools Act in Ontario not only created separate Roman Catholic schools, but also set up segregated schools for blacks, since the Protestant majority - and Roman Catholic parents too - did not want their children sharing space with black kids.

Blacks were routinely denied employment and refused retail services. Runaway slaves were cruelly exploited by local white farmers demanding grueling hours of field work in return for starvation wages. It is not surprising that after the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, the majority of escaped slaves returned home or that in 1911, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian icon, announced changes in the Immigration Act banning for one year, "any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada."

It is true, as Kenney writes, that legitimate "challenges" remain, but we've come a long way. Still, if we are going to mark the abolition of slavery and Canada's role in it, why sanitize it?

Why not just present it as it as it really happened?