Vincent J. Curtis
1 Aug 20
The BLM movement in Canada is trying to foist a false history of the presents of Blacks in Canada. The two most important seem to be that Blacks have been in Canada for 400 years, and that slavery was not abolished in Canada until 1 August 1834. Let's dispel those myths as they were expressed in an article on the subject that was published in the People's Daily this date.
First off, "Canada" in any form did not come into existence until 1791. Prior to that, the legal entity that existed within the geographical limits of present day Canada was the French colony of New France, which was conquered by the British in 1759 during the Seven Years War. So, there is a conceptual problem with Canada even existing for 400 years. The second claim, of 400 years' presents rests on the record of one Mathieu da Costa having been employed as a translator by Samuel de Champlain, the founder of New France. The records show that da Costa worked for about three years in the colony, but did not settle in it. He returned to France about 1617, and sued in a French court for unpaid wages and expenses. The fact that he had standing to sue in a French court at that time would indicate that he didn't look particularly African. In fact, da Costa is described of being of Portuguese-African descent. "African" is a pretty broad tern, and Moroccan is just as African as Nigerian is. So, the claim that blacks have been in Canada for 400 years is straight up false on the basis of this one tenuous case not settling in New France.
Slavery really didn't exist in Canada at all. When United Empire Loyalists came to Upper Canada after the American Revolution, some brought slaves with them. There were said to be some 16 in the town of York (present day Toronto) in 1793. The new legislature abolished slave holding in Upper Canada by a combination of immediate freedom for new entries and by purchasing the freedom of the few already here. The burden of raising child slaves to adulthood was placed on slave holders. They simply couldn't cut them loose and expect them to make it on their own. They had to raise the children they "owned." Property rights were seen differently then than now; the government simply couldn't take property without compensation. Lower Canada never dealt with the issue, so far as I am aware, because slaves simply didn't exist in New France/Lower Canada, so there was no reason to. The French dealt with Indians, not slaves.
The article contains a number of half-truths and falsehoods that are commonly passed as a revisionist history. The assertions are: that blacks have been in Canada for four hundred years, and that slavery was abolished in Canada on August 1st, 1834.
Four hundred years ago, 1620, the colony of New France existed around present-day Quebec City. It consisted of subsidence farmers and fur traders. This system of economics did not support slavery, and no slavery or blacks existed in New France up to the time of the conquest in 1759. The person Mathieu da Costa, mentioned in the article, was a mixed race Portuguese-African who worked for a couple of years in New France but did not settle there. He had standing to sue for unpaid expenses in a French court in 1617, which may say something about his racial composition.
The legal entity called Canada was first organized by Britain with the passage of the Constitution Act, 1791. As mentioned in the article, Upper Canada abolished slavery in 1793, by a process the author obviously didn’t understand. Hence, slavery may have been abolished in the British Empire in 1834, and Canada was then a part of the British Empire, but slavery was actually abolished in Canada in 1793. It never existed in Lower Canada, and so no action was ever taken, or needed, by the legislature of Lower Canada.
Revisionist history in the service of today’s racial politics does us no good.
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