As recently as 2025, human rights advocate and President of Black Class Action Secretariat (BCAS) Nicholas Marcus Thompson (pictured above, centre) has been publicly discussing the failings of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (HRC) with City News. In 2024, Thompson and the BCAS were part of a coalition that raised a complaint to a United Nations human rights oversight body alleging systemic anti-Black racism at the Canadian HRC. Possibly due to those open discussions, the HRC was placed under an international review for very clear findings of discrimination against Black and racialized workers, and for habitually rejecting race-based complaints (acknowledged by the federal government and the HRC themselves).
I’d like to repeat Mr. Thompson’s question that he raised in these discussions, a question that is important for all of us to ask: shouldn’t it be imperative for the Canadian Human Rights Commission to be this country’s leading voice on how to combat racial discrimination? They’re not; and besides not helping victims of racial abuse, the Human Rights Commission is cultivating this cookie-cutter corporate environment of toxic racial discrimination within its own workplace.
There are quite a few seemingly unrelated questions that many of us here today deem equally important: why does a human being lose their human right to dignity when they become houseless with no financial means? Why do children who are wards of the state and supposedly receiving child care and/or child protection end up as young adults with less protection from poverty and easy prey for trafficking schemes? Don’t lower class workers deserve protection from their abusive bosses from the higher ruling class? Don’t the least protected among us deserve protection from the governments we are electing? As the HRC example shows us, we need protection both by the government and from the government.
Shockingly enough, the least protected by design end up with agencies who only pretend to help. This itself is the deeper issue and the deadly double-cross. Now is the time to realize why government reports will always fall short: when we realize that agencies tasked and paid very well to carry out direct mandates to assist our most vulnerable citizens are merely exacerbating our problems, then the people must speak up. Exposing this is a big part of our mandate as socialists to centre equity. The HRC is showing us that governments that exist to protect capitalism will never side with workers (particularly the most oppressed workers), no matter how many agencies or commissions they make. As long as governments are allowed to discriminate against equity-seeking groups, we will remain divided as a class. Fighting for socialism means fighting against racism and all other forms of oppression.
Human rights advocates and socialists must vow to follow up on news stories about public inquiries or reviews of organizations like the HRC, especially since these kinds of organizations were mandated to address inequity by decreasing barriers to victims of discrimination. But how can the HRC in any way be decreasing barriers when they’re practicing the racial bias and the discrimination they are mandated to combat?
The crucial issues of enforced class inequity have been created by colonialism and then spread throughout the capitalist system, laundered into legitimacy by legal writing and government bodies. Social and racial justice have long been subverted under capitalism. This is no mystery — it is our persistent Canadian history.
Now is the time to truly center equity in our socialist movements towards real social justice and real democracy. And so, the Human Rights Commission should take notice that we are speaking directly to them: no more hypocrisy.
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