Last week was a difficult one for Black and Indigenous organizers and allies in Ottawa. From Nov. 19 to 21, protestors gathered in the lead-up to the Ottawa Police Services board vote on the proposed 2021 budget. The protest ended when about 50 police officers showed up at 3:30 in the morning and arrested 12 protestors.
On Nov. 24, the OPS Board then approved the budget after hearing from almost 100 speakers opposing it the day before.
One of the only ways to provide input on the budget was to register to speak online. But participants didn’t learn how to sign up from officials sources – a point about the city’s lack of communications raised with the board last year. They heard it from organizers who shared information in accessible ways and galvanized viewers to the city’s YouTube channel where the meeting got 3,300-plus views — more than almost all of the city’s videos. The proceedings, however, were painful to watch. Often participants begged the board to engage, to provide questions or comments on pleas to freeze the budget that brought some to tears.
But they were largely met with resounding silence throughout the almost seven-hour process. At the start of the delegations, Chair Diane Deans pre-emptively cautioned speakers to be “respectful,” a reprimand she repeated multiple times.
The idea of “respect” in corporate environments is dredged in whiteness. Respectability politics is often a mechanism that Black and marginalized people have had to adhere to to be accepted and avoid being viewed as “threatening.”
While most of the delegates had prepared speeches and adhered to council language to conform to ideals of respectability, those who voiced their upset outside of these confines were admonished by Deans and often Councillor Carol Anne Meehan who rolled her eyes or shook her head.
Chief Peter Sloly never seemed present either—often seeming to look at his phone or talk to someone off camera. He appeared oblivious when a delegate asked him a question and when another asked him to look at him when he was speaking. Deans said almost every racialized name like she was pulling teeth, making names sound like a burden and sloppily rushing through them or adding random vowels and consonants. She left out the letter “L” in Souheil and pronounced his last name Benslimane as Ben Salami—yes, the sandwich meat. She also mispronounced the name of Jamal Boyce, the Black University of Ottawa student whose case of racial profiling was widely covered in the news last year, and was oblivious someone signed up as Inshallah Wallahi was a joke.
And while Deans and Meehan licked their wounds when participants openly poked fun, humor is a critical and comforting way to access politics in times of need. Take a look at the Daily Show or the Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinners.
The meeting also demonstrated the board’s own internal issues with racism. When Daljit Nirman, a provincial appointed member had a question, Deans told him she couldn’t hear him multiple times, treating him briskly until he gave up. The next day, Meehan imitated his accent on the call.
It is a problem when these events go unreported in traditional media.
So what next? Council should sit with the criticism made at the meeting before their final vote on Dec. 9. It may not be easy, but we would be better off for it.