Glavin: Canadians have no reason to be smug about race | Ottawa Citizen

24.1.15

Glavin: Canadians have no reason to be smug about race | Ottawa Citizen: Canadians have long boasted that this country was born in 1867 without the “original sin” of slavery. We’ve prided ourselves on being unblemished by the thing that disfigured the American republic of 1776. The wickedness that persisted in Jim Crow laws a full century after the bloody civil war of the 1860s was pulled down only by the great civil rights movement that Martin Luther King led to the steps of the Alabama legislature in Montgomery that day in 1965.

But Canada harbours its own disgraceful legacy. Down through the decades, scores of federal and provincial laws isolated, dispossessed and ghettoized one racial or ethnic minority after another. Asians weren’t allowed to vote in Canada until the late 1940s; federally-registered Indians had to wait until 1960.