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Toronto’s “Sankofa Square” – The terrible folly and historic injustice of erasing the legacy of abolitionist Henry Dundas

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7 months ago

13 minute read

From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Lynn McDonald

Canadians’ keenness to repent for the misdeeds of the past has its merits, but has also led to gross errors of judgment.

Mayor Olivia Chow and Toronto City Council went even more over-the-top in their choice of “Sankofa Square” for Yonge-Dundas Square. Other renamings in the city have either substituted a banal name, like substituting Toronto Metropolitan University for Ryerson University, or, more frequently, selected an Indigenous name as a substitute for “colonizer” monikers. The Ghanaian word “Sankofa,” however, was selected for its meaning: “learning from the past.” But what can we learn about slavery in Ghana?

Slavery was rife both throughout Africa and much of the world in centuries past. Under its previous name, the Gold Coast, Ghana was a prime place for the sale of slaves to European slave traders. As well, its version of slavery included the horrible practice of executing the slaves of a chieftain who died, so that they could serve him in the afterlife.

In 1847, a Methodist missionary, the Rev. George Chapman, sent an account of this practice from his mission post in Kumasi, the second-largest city in Ghana. In an article in the Toronto Christian Guardian titled “Horrid Treatment of Infants in Ashanti,” Chapman explained that both men and women slaves, of all ages, were executed. When a woman slave with a nursing infant was beheaded, her baby fell to the ground “with her headless body.” Such an infant was regarded as an “abomination.” It gets worse:

“The body of the mother may remain in the street all day exposed to the gaze of every passer-by, and by her side may remain her helpless, living infant exposed to, not only the heedless foot of the multitude, but suffering intensely from the direct rays of a tropical sun. Seldom does any eye pity; no one would ever think of taking away that child and thus saving its life—it remains in the street until evening, and then, as the individual whose business is to drag away the bodies of these victims, takes away the mother; he may at the same time take away the child, not to pity and save it, but to cast both mother and child into the cell where these wretched victims are thrown, and they both remain to putrify [sic] or to be devoured by swine or carnivorous birds.”

In the same article, Chapman described being alerted to the beheading of a female slave in a nearby village. The dead mother’s baby, still alive, was left by her side. Starving, it had crawled up to his mother’s body to lick the blood from her bleeding neck. The missionary hastened to the execution site to try to save it, but he was too late: a bystander saw Chapman coming and prevented rescue by standing on the infant’s neck to kill it.

Ghana abolished slavery only in 1874, roughly 100 years after it was abolished, through court cases, in 1772 in England, and in 1778 in Scotland. For Scotland, it was Henry Dundas, as a lawyer, who won over the Scottish law lords on the appeal case he headed of an escaped enslaved man, Joseph Knight. They not only freed him, by a solid 8-4 majority, but ruled that there could be no slavery in Scotland, and thus freed all other slaves in the country.

This was Henry Dundas’s first achievement as an abolitionist.

Ontario, thanks to John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor, has the merit of being the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to abolish slavery, albeit gradually, in 1793, about 80 years before Ghana got around to it. Simcoe, it should be noted, was an appointee of Henry Dundas, a fellow abolitionist.

Yet Mayor Chow called the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square “beautiful,” and even claimed that she could not “think of a better a name for a gathering place at the heart of our city” than Sankofa Square. To Chow, Henry Dundas’s actions were no less than “horrific.”


Dundas and Ryerson: the Christian Guardian connection

Rev. Chapman sent his story to the Christian Guardian, a weekly Methodist magazine based in Toronto, for which Egerton Ryerson was the founding editor. He was no longer the editor when this story appeared, but he had himself written on abolition in the British Empire and the United States. Ryerson, notably, was a visitor in the British House of Commons on May 14, 1833, for the last debate and adoption of the law to abolish slavery in the British Empire. He gave a superb report on it in the Christian Guardian titled “House of Commons: Colonial Slavery.”

Ryerson also happened to be in Boston, en route to England in 1850, when the United States Congress passed the draconian Fugitive Slave Act. This required the return of slaves caught in free states, where they previously would have been safe. That law meant that escaped slaves from the American South would have to make it to Ontario to be safe, which sparked the development of the “Underground Railroad.” In a report written for the Christian Guardian, Ryerson condemned the law as an attempt to “trample under foot” the “rights of man,” adding that it was “incredible to me” that slavery was being championed in Boston, “the cradle of liberty.”


The abolition of slavery in Africa

The British law of 1833 that abolished slavery in the “British colonies” effectively meant in the West Indies; it also included Canada, which by comparison, had very few slaves. It would take decades more for slavery in Africa itself to be abolished, as well as the slave trade on the continent’s east coast. Recall journalist Henry Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” on finding missionary doctor David Livingstone alive, but ill, on the coast of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Livingstone had himself witnessed the beheading of 400 local slaves by slave traders from Zanzibar.

Given Ghana’s significant role in the transatlantic slave trade, and Dundas’s clear opposition to slavery, it makes little sense to strike Dundas’s name off of Toronto’s most famous public square. But so far, Chow is sticking by her assertion that Dundas’s legacy with regards to slavery is “horrific.”


The inconvenient truths about slavery and its abolition

Canadians, and especially Torontonians, are keen to repent of the misdeeds of the past, both against Indigenous people and enslaved Africans. This new humility has its merits, but has also led to gross errors of judgment, especially false accusations against supposed “colonizers” or “colonialists.” Ryerson himself was accused of responsibility for the “colonialist” past, although he himself was born in Ontario, on a farm north of Lake Erie. Neglected is the documented fact that Indigenous societies themselves were slave societies. The losers of wars between Indigenous societies could be killed, mutilated, and/or enslaved, and even sold as slaves. Those more fortunate were adopted by the conquering group, in other words, assimilated – another no-no in today’s world.

No Indigenous society is known to have actually abolished slavery. Indeed, Indigenous slaves were among those freed by the abolition laws of Britain and Upper Canada.

Nor did any African state ever abolish slavery or the slave trade of its own accord. It took decades of pressure from Great Britain, and sometimes bribes from it, to achieve its abolition. Again, Dundas had some understanding of the key role of African leaders in slavery and the slave trade. As he stated in 1792 in the House of Commons when defending his amendment to William Wilberforce’s motion for abolition of the slave trade, to make it “gradual”:

“If once a Prince of an enlightened character should rise up in that hemisphere, his first act would be to make the means of carrying off all slaves from thence impracticable. What reason had they to suppose that the light of Heaven would never descend upon the continent of Africa? From that moment there must be an end of African trade. The first system of improvement, the first idea of happiness that would arise in that continent, would bring with it the downfall of the African trade, and that in a more effectual way than is done by regulations of this country.”

Dundas had a much better understanding of the complications of abolishing slavery and the slave trade than other abolitionists, certainly more than Wilberforce, the Parliamentary abolition leader. But even Dundas had no idea that it would take nearly a century to get rid of it everywhere, and that until it was abolished everywhere, with thorough enforcement measures as well as the adoption of laws, it would remain in force, and many would be its miserable victims.


A better name than “Sankofa Square”

There is good reason not to go back to “Yonge-Dundas” Square, for Sir George Yonge, when governor of Cape Colony, South Africa, made money on the slave trade. Yet neither Mayor Chow, nor Toronto’s previous mayor, John Tory, ever condemned him. This is not to suggest renaming Yonge Street, for too much Ontario history has passed along it. The Rebels of 1837 marched down Yonge Street from Eglinton Street, only to be stopped at Maitland Street. Egerton Ryerson, in his first post as a Methodist minister, had his start as an itinerant preacher riding the “Yonge Street Circuit.”

Reasonable titles would be “Dundas Square,” or, better, “Slavery Abolition Square.” “Ryerson Square” would suit, but only when the anti-Ryerson people come to realize that they fell for false accusations. The square is close to where he developed such great educational reforms as free schools for all, teacher training, and free public libraries, initially for Ontario, in time adopted throughout the country.

Lynn McDonald, CM, Ph.D., is a former Member of Parliament, a professor emerita of University of Guelph, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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Canada needs to get serious about securing its border

Published on December 19, 2024

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From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Todd Hataley for Inside Policy

US President-elect Donald Trump has made clear his intention to call out Canada on weak enforcement on migration, money laundering, and the cross-border trafficking of narcotics, especially fentanyl.

Until just very recently, Canada has remained largely silent on these issues. Security agencies, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Sûreté du Québec (SQ) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), have tried to secure the border via memorandums of understanding, framework agreements, and legislated agreements that allow them to share information and even work together.

However, resources are limited for cross-border law enforcement co-operation. CBSA remains  understaffed and RCMP Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (which work with US security agencies) have limited geographic reach, leaving much of the enforcement between ports of entry left to police of jurisdiction, who already are hard pressed to provide services to the communities they serve.

The Canadian government’s apparent strategy of largely ignoring the problem is becoming more difficult to maintain. With the United States Border Patrol intercepting increasing numbers of illegal migrants crossing into that country from Canada, it’s clear the porous border is a concern. Exacerbating the situation is the recent discovery of illegal narcotic super labs in Canada – where production far outstrips the market – and Canada’s unfortunate, albeit well-deserved reputation as a haven for global money launderers.

Thanks to Trump’s 25 per cent tariff threat, the crisis is now endangering Canada’s relationship with its largest and most-important trading partner. This announcement sent all sectors of government and the private sector into a frenzy, prompting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to fly to Florida to seek out an early audience with Trump at his Mar-a-lago resort home. Trudeau’s team spun the trip as proof that the federal government is serious about working with the US to address its border security and public safety concerns.

But with political crises piling up, it will be difficult for Trudeau to also manage the political optics of kowtowing to Trump, who is widely unpopular among Canadians. Spending extra money to appease Trump during the ongoing housing, immigration, and health care crises could make the Trudeau’s popularity nosedive even further. Adding insult to injury, Trump is essentially demanding that Canada do America’s work by stopping illicit goods and people from entering the United States: customs and border security officials generally work on the principle of stopping goods from entering their country.

Trudeau faces many practical challenges, including the need to ramp up the number of border and law enforcement agents who have the skill sets and training required to police offences such as drug production, money laundering, and the cross-border smuggling of goods and humans. Purchasing helicopters and drones to conduct surveillance will do little to aid enforcement, since most goods smuggled across the border pass through legitimate border crossings. RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme even suggested putting RCMP cadets along the border – a challenging proposition since vast swathes of the border are either wilderness or water. Surveillance is one thing, but the act of enforcement takes skilled people with the capacity to investigate, gather evidence, and articulate that evidence into something that can be used by the courts for convictions. These concerns are not being addressed in this current frenzy to spend money on border security.

There is also good evidence that fortifying the border, or what has become known as forward deployment along the border, does nothing to stop the cross-border transit of contraband goods and people. One need only look as far as the United States-Mexico border to see the failure of forward deployment.

As authorities increase border enforcement activities, the costs of smuggling goods and people mounts for criminals. Eventually, it drives out amateurs, leaving only the professional, skilled, and well-equipped criminal groups. This, in turn, often leads to increasing levels of violence along the border, making interdiction and disruption far more difficult for law enforcement agencies.

Canada has several clear options to address Trump’s border concerns. It can increase the staffing of frontline CBSA officers, including border agents, inland enforcement units that actively investigate and remove individuals from Canada, international liaison officers, and customs processing staff. It can also create a plan for CBSA to take over enforcement between ports of entry. Currently, CBSA enforces entry into Canada at the ports of entry and the RCMP are responsible for the areas in between. Having a single agency manage the border builds capacity and expertise, avoiding inter-bureaucracy competition and confusion.

Canada can also work to better integrate law enforcement, intelligence units, and border services at all levels of government and across international boundaries. Cross-border crime operations are often planned and execute far from the border.

Some of this already takes place, as noted above, but it needs to go much deeper and be more supportive at both institutional and individual levels. This process must also include private sector stakeholders: companies such as FedEx, UPS, and Amazon, as well as freight forwarders, trucking companies, and customs brokers, are all involved in cross-border trade. Their participation as partners in reducing cross-border criminal activity is essential.

Finally, the government needs to designate laws specific to cross-border crime and include meaningful penalties as a means of deterrence.

Hyper-focusing on the border while ignoring other aspects of cross-border crime may be good political optics, but it is a bad strategy. What we really need is functional enforcement – including an integrated process extended vertically and horizontally across all sectors of border stakeholders, at and away from the border, supported by strong policy and legislation. This is the path forward to better cross-border crime enforcement.

Dr. Todd Hataley is a professor in the School of Justice and Community Development at Fleming College. A retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he worked as an investigator in organized crime, national security, cross-border crime, and extra-territorial torture. He is a contributor to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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Canada can – and should – crack down on trade-based money laundering

Published on December 14, 2024

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From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Jamie Ferrill for Inside Policy

Neglecting to take decisive action enables organized criminal networks whose activities cause significant harm on our streets and those of our international partners.

Financial crime bears considerable political and economic risk. For the incoming Trump administration, the threat that transnational organized crime and the illicit financial flows pose to global financial stability is a top priority. The threat of tariffs by the Trump administration makes the costs to Canada in enabling global financial crime all too apparent. In addition to the cost of tariffs themselves, the associated reputational risk and loss of confidence in Canada’s financial system has implications for investments, credit, supply chains, and bilateral co-operation and agreements.

Canada’s proximity to major international markets, stable economy, high standard of living, and strong institutions and frameworks make it an attractive place to do business: for both legitimate and criminal enterprises.

Trade is a key contributing sector for Canada’s economic security. It represents two-thirds of Canada’s GDP, and exports alone support nearly 3.3 million Canadian jobs. Trade is also highly vulnerable to criminal exploitation. Ineffective oversight, regulatory complexity, and lagging technology adoption, coupled with a lack of export controls, make it possible to move vast proceeds of crimes, such as those from drug trafficking, human trafficking, corruption, and tax evasion through the global trade system.

These vulnerabilities are well-known by transnational organized crime groups. They are able to effectively move billions of dollars of dirty money through the global trade system every year, a method commonly referred to as Trade-Based Money Laundering (TBML).

While any statistics must be interpreted with caution, evidence shows that TBML is a prevalent method of money laundering.

What is it?

There are several types of Trade-Based Financial Crimes such as terrorism financing through trade, sanctions evasion, and simply trade fraud. However, the TBML definition is necessarily specific. Essentially here, TBML is a money laundering method: the processing of criminal proceeds to disguise their illegal origin. TBML involves the movement of value through the global trade system to obfuscate the illicit origin. This is usually done through document fraud: undervaluing, overvaluing, phantom shipping, or multiple invoicing. Different techniques employ different aspects of the supply chain. And TBML may be just one method used within larger money laundering operations.

By way of example, US authorities allege that two Chinese nationals living in Chicago laundered tens of millions of dollars for the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels. Drugs were smuggled into the United States and sold throughout the country. The proceeds from these sales were collected by the Chinese nationals. Those proceeds were used to purchase bulk electronics in the United States, which were then shipped – with a falsified value – to co-conspirators in China, who sold them locally. The legitimacy provided by the electronics sales and the trade transaction provide cover to “clean” proceeds from precursor crime.

Either the importer and/or the exporter of the goods can shift value. Chances here are the electronics shipped were undervalued: on leaving the country, they are declared at a (much) lower value than they are actually worth. The importer in China pays the undervalued invoice, then sells the goods for what they are worth. The profit from those electronics now appears clean, since it was used for a “legitimate” sale. The ensuing value gap can be transferred informally or stored as illicit wealth. The value has now shifted, without fiat currency leaving the country of origin.

But the cycle does not stop there. The value and money itself continue to traverse around the world, through various intermediaries such as financial institutions or cryptocurrency exchanges. It then goes right back into the system and enables the very crimes and organized crime groups that generated it in the first place. It is, in short, the business model of organized crime.

The Canadian problem

Ultimately, the proceeds of crime that have been legitimised through TBML (and other money laundering methods) supports the criminal enterprises that generated the value in the first place. In the example, these are prolific cartels who have been behind the fentanyl crisis, migrant trafficking and abuse, corruption, and widespread violence that destabilizes communities and undermines governments across North America and beyond.

With new actors, drug routes, and ways of doing business, the cartels are very much active in Canada. The Sinaloa cartel in particular has established a significant presence in Canada where it controls the cocaine market, manufactures and distributes fentanyl, and is embedded in local criminal networks. This increases Canada’s role as a strategic location for drug trafficking and a base to export abroad, notably to Europe, the US, and Australia.

Hells Angels, Red Scorpions, ’Ndrangheta, and other organized crime groups are also exploiting Canada’s strategic location using their transnational links. These groups are active in criminal activities that generate proceeds of crime, which they launder through Canadian institutions. From drug trafficking to extortion to human and sex trafficking, the foundation of organized crime relies on generating and maximizing profits. The proceeds generally need to be laundered; otherwise, there are direct lines back to the criminal organizations. They are, without a doubt, exploiting the trade sector; the very sector that provides so much economic security for Canada.

Canada’s regulation, reporting, and prosecution record for money laundering is notoriously weak. Its record for regulation, reporting, and prosecution for trade-based financial crimes, namely here TBML, is even weaker.

As financial institutions and other regulated entities face increased scrutiny following the TD Bank scandal and the Cullen Commission’s inquiry into money laundering in BC, more criminal activity is likely to be displaced into the trade sector and the institutions it comprises.

TBML is difficult for financial institutions to detect, especially given that 80 per cent of trade is done through open accounts. It exploits established trade structures that are meant to protect the system –like documentation and invoicing processes – by manipulating transactions outside traditional payment systems, which requires more sophisticated anti-money laundering strategies to address these hidden vulnerabilities.

Addressing the problem

Trade is a gaping vulnerability. Yet, it attracts minimal attention in countering transnational financial crime. Containing the fentanyl crisis for one requires a collaborative effort to bolster supply chains and the trade sector against financial crime. This means global cooperation, technological advances (such as blockchain technology), appropriate resourcing, more scrutiny on high-risk countries and shippers, and regulatory innovation.

But political will is in short supply. The federal government’s Budget 2024 and the resulting proposed Regulations Amending Certain Regulations Made Under the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorism Financing Act will grant CBSA new authorities to counter TBML, but limited resources to make good on them. And CBSA cannot do it alone.

Transnational organized crime and the illicit financial flows that support it poses a threat to global financial stability. The enabling of financial crime hurts Canada’s reputation abroad. With a new political regime emerging in the US, Canada cannot afford to be seen as a weak link. Loss of confidence in a country and its financial system has implications for investments, credit, supply chains, and bilateral cooperation and agreements.

By neglecting to take decisive action, we inadvertently enable organized criminal networks whose activities cause significant harm on our streets and those of our international partners. With profits as their primary driver, it is imperative that we scrutinize financial pathways to disrupt these illicit operations effectively.

Organized crime groups are not bound by privacy laws, bureaucracy, political agendas, and government budgets. They are continually evolving and staying many steps ahead of what Canada is equipped to control: technologically, geographically, strategically, logistically, and tactically. Without appropriate regulations, technological advances, and resources in place, we will continue to be a laggard in countering financial crime.

More systematic change is needed across regulatory frameworks, law enforcement coordination and resourcing, and international partnerships to strengthen oversight, close loopholes, and enhance detection and disruption.  It would be a low-cost signal to the Trump administration that Canada is committed to upping its game.

Jamie Ferrill is senior lecturer in Financial Crime at Charles Sturt University and co-editor of Dirty Money: Financial Crime in Canada.

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