Canada’s odious vote on a UN resolution condemning slavery reflects this country’s historic contribution to African enslavement.
Wednesday Canada abstained on a General Assembly resolution condemning the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as “among the gravest violations of human rights in human history.” The resolution recognized that reparations represent a concrete step towards remedying the ongoing legacy of African enslavement.
123 countries voted in favour of the Ghanaian sponsored resolution while the US, Argentina and Israel voted against it. Canada was among 52 largely European nations abstaining.
Canada’s vote may be explained by ties to the US/Zionist empire or its role in NATO and the Anglo settler Five Eyes intelligence arrangement. Or because Africans were held in bondage here for 200 years and the Atlantic provinces had important ties to the Caribbean slave plantation economies.
For over 200 years, New France and the British North America colonies held Africans in bondage. The first recorded slave sale in New France took place in 1628. There were at least 3,000 African slaves in what are now known as Québec, Ontario and the Maritimes. Leading historical figures such as René Bourassa, James McGill, Colin McNabb, Joseph Papineau and Peter Russell all owned slaves and some were strident advocates of the practice.
After conquering Quebec, Britain strengthened the laws that enabled slavery. It wasn’t until 1833 that slavery was abolished in what is now Canada and across the rest of the British Empire.
Canadians propped up slavery in several other ways. Canada helped the British quell Caribbean slave rebellions, particularly during the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution, which disrupted the region’s slave economy. Much of Britain’s Halifax-based squadron arrived on the shores of the West Indies in 1793, and many of the ships that set sail to the Caribbean at this time were assembled in the town’s naval yard. Additionally, several prominent Canadian-born (or based) individuals fought to capture and re-establish slavery in the French colonies.
In what may be Canada’s most significant contribution to the British war effort in the Caribbean, a dozen Nova Scotia privateers captured at least 57 enemy vessels in the West Indies between 1793 and 1805. Licensed by the state to seize enemy boats during wartime, the privateers sought to protect a triangular Caribbean/Maritimes fish-plantation market decimated by French privateers.
Atlantic Canada literally fed the slave system for decades. In Emancipation Day, Natasha Henry explains: “Very few Canadians are aware that at one time their nation’s economy was firmly linked to African slavery through the building and sale of slave ships, the sale and purchase of slaves to and from the Caribbean, and the exchange of timber, cod, and other food items from the Maritimes for West-Indian slave-produced goods.”
A central component of the economy revolved around providing the resources that enabled slavery. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland generated great wealth selling cheap, high-protein food to keep millions of “enslaved people working 16 hours a day.” In Capitalism and Slavery, post-independence Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Eric Williams highlights the role of cod in the Caribbean plantations: “The Newfoundland fishery depended to a considerable extent on the annual export of dried fish to the West Indies, the refuse or ‘poor John’ fish, ‘fit for no other consumption.’” High-quality cod from today’s Atlantic Canada was sent to the Mediterranean while the reject fish was sold to Caribbean slave-owners.
Much of the capital used to establish what’s now Scotiabank and CIBC came from supplying the Caribbean slave colonies.
Abstaining on a UN resolution seeking redress for the transatlantic slave trade adds to Canada’s shameful contribution to African enslavement.
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