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Projects and Initiatives
WORKER SUPPORT SERVICES The Neighbourhood Organization – TNO
The Neighbourhood Organization (TNO) and the Black Legal Action Centre are partnered in the Worker Support Services (WSS) project. BLAC’s Staff Lawyer is providing legal information workshops to temporary foreign workers across Ontario.
This new program provides support to temporary foreign workers in partnership with agencies across Ontario by:
- Helping migrant workers to access accurate information and available services and supports including health, legal, and social services in their communities.
- Increasing education and empowering migrant workers to exercise their rights while in Canada.
- Supporting increased social, civic engagement and participation of migrant workers in their communities.
Learn more about TNO and WSS here.
COMBATTING ANTI-BLACK RACISM THROUGH LITIGATION AND SYSTEM NAVIGATION
In July 2022, BLAC received funding through Canada’s Justice Partnership and Innovation Program (JPIP) for a four-year project called Combatting Anti-Black Racism through Litigation and System Navigation (the “Project”).
LITIGATION
In the project’s first two years, BLAC will aim to provide legal professionals with the information, research, templates, and expert reports they need to raise arguments related to individual and systemic anti-Black racism in criminal, immigration, child protection, education, prison, and civil matters.
SYSTEM NAVIGATION
In the third and fourth years of the Project, BLAC will engage System Navigators to provide information, advice, and supports to Black people with low- or no-income who have a legal issue in the area of criminal, child protection, immigration, education, or civil law (i.e., civil suits by people who have had a discriminatory or deadly encounter with a police service or correctional institution).
The Project was launched on November 9, 2022. Read the official news release here.
providing support to black children and families in the CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM
COLLECTIVE of CHILD WELFARE SURVIVORS
BLAC is proud to act the organizational mentor for the Collective of Child Welfare Survivors.
The Collective of Child Welfare Survivors (CCWS) is a grassroots organization that provides various support for child welfare survivors between the ages 15-25 years old, particularly Black, Indigenous, and racialized individuals as well as their families. CCWS works in partnership with BLAC and other critical partners related to the child welfare experience.
CCWS’ main pillars are systemic organizing, community development, and one-on-one individual intervention/advocacy. The Collective grounds the work it does under the main pillars in the principles of critical youth-centering, decolonization, and addressing anti-Black racism. Most persons seeking support (“PSS”) are Black, Indigenous, and racialized people.
The mission of the Collective to create and implement an organization that addresses and rethinks child welfare and care for child welfare survivors and families. It is the Collective’s goal to create spaces for child welfare survivors to develop themselves and their relations beyond the various ways that child welfare survivors get blamed, pathologized, and placed in institutions. Ultimately, it is the Collective’s goal to think and practice beyond what’s currently decided as practice for child welfare.
To find out more, visit www.collectiveofcws.ca.
Our System, Our Children, Our Responsibility: A Campaign Against the Deportation of Child Welfare Survivors is a coalition steered by BLAC that seeks to end the deportations of child welfare survivors and to address the related immigration issues.
We demand that the government:
1. Halt all the deportations of child welfare survivors currently facing removal orders;
2. Reinstate the permanent resident status of any/all child welfare survivors;
3. Develop a clear and accessible pathway to citizenship for all child welfare survivors.
Click here to read the letter the coalition sent to the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, the Minister of Public Safety, and the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion regarding immigration removals and anti-Black racism.
Click here to read about the Public Policy we requested the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to create.
Click here to apply for Permanent Resident status using the temporary public policy implemented as a result of the coalition’s work.
As a member of the Fresh Start Coalition, BLAC is working alongside 85+ other civil society organizations to change the law so people can move beyond their old criminal records.
We are advocating for the federal government change Canada’s record suspension system and revamp the way Canada deals with old criminal records. The coalition is calling on the federal government to implement a ‘spent’ regime, which would automatically seal a person’s criminal record if they have successfully completed their sentence and lived in the community without further criminal convictions.
Black communities are disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system. Adopting a spent regime will promote reintegration, workforce participation, and improve community safety.
Alongside Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change (COP-COC) and others, BLAC made a joint submission on the fifth and sixth periodic reports of Canada under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
It focuses on issues facing racialized communities, immigrants, refugees and migrants in Canada. In consultation and continued solidarity with organizations serving Indigenous communities, this report also addresses a number of issues disproportionately and uniquely faced by Indigenous communities.
Many of the issues highlighted in this report were never addressed by the Canadian Government in its previous reports. To the extent that they were addressed, the Government of Canada has either not accepted the recommendations or has not acted on them. Some of these issues continue to remain unresolved since the Committee’s 2003 review of Canada during its thirty-fourth session.
BLAC, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) urge Parliament to:
- amend Bill C-5 to remove all mandatory minimums,
- remove the ban on conditional sentences for offences with a mandatory minimum penalty
- allow trial judges to depart from mandatory minimum sentences and restrictions on the use of conditional sentences
- amend s. 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code to include specific reference to Black defendants
- fully decriminalize simple drug possession, and provide automatic expungement of criminal records for simple drug possession
Read our full submissions here or a summary of our submissions here.
