Thank you so much. I was saying that I'm now retired—or they say I'm retired, but I'm not really, because my activism continues.

Speaking today on this bill, I guess I have a bit of sadness. My sadness lies in the fact that, as activists, we've been trying for so long to bring the issues of our communities to the forefront. Here we are again, but this is exciting. I'm happy now that we've made it to the national level. I'm hoping for success.

I was looking at this bill and at the word “redress”. We have a saying in our community, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it”, but using “redress” means there's something broken and we've come to you to help us fix it.

I come from the African-Nova Scotian community. It's long term in Nova Scotia and we are the original African people of Canada. Right now, I'm sitting in my family homestead. I don't know if many of you know Truro, Nova Scotia. I thought the best way to talk about environmental racism would be to look out my window and try to tell you the story of this little community in which I sit.

I know some of you have a hard time getting your heads around why we need this special environmental racism bill for these communities. It's because of the word “disproportionate”, which is in Bill C-230. It doesn't mean to say that environmental degradation doesn't happen in all different communities, but it is happening disproportionately in our community.

This little community of Truro has three traditional Black communities and they're nicknamed “the Island”, “the Marsh” and “the Hill”. The Island had a dump that began many, many years ago, even before my time. The Black community had to deal with all the atrocities that went along with that. The white community started to move in closer to our traditional communities, and they said, “This dump has to go. We're not having it in our backyard.” Imagine where they decided to move the dump. They moved it to another Black area of the town, the Hill. There was never a cleanup of the original dump site. There was never any encasement. Today, our children's playground sits on that dump. It's never been dealt with.

My community on the Marsh was a traditional Black community, which is now gentrified. There are only three Black families left in this community, where we were forced to live because of the racism of the day. Part of that has to do with the effect of the flooding that took place in this community. With the flooding and the lack of adequate housing and resources, the Black community has all but disappeared. Like I said, there are only three families left, because new people coming into the community— who were not from our community—had access to all the resources that go along with building and flood-proofing and not having to deal with all the degradation that the Black community has.

This bill asks only that you collaborate and develop a strategy to deal with this disproportionate impact, which is still affecting our Black and indigenous communities today. We're asking for redress. I'm also a former trade union activist. I am proud to say that I can remember, many years ago, on the Canadian Labour Congress, introducing environmental racism to what was called the “national anti-racism task force report”.

The Canadian Labour Congress, also had trouble getting its head around it. What is this thing, environmental racism, and why should you have special or distinct clauses that go along with it?

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