By Neil Armstrong
A coverage skilled and neighborhood activist, a public well being advocate, and two historians from Ontario’s Black communities are among the many 78 Canadians just lately appointed to the Order of Canada by Governor Normal Mary Simon.
Debbie Douglas, govt director of the Ontario Council of Companies Serving Immigrants (OCASI), will likely be a kind of who will obtain the honour. Her work entails highlighting problems with fairness, antiracism, gender, financial class and sexual orientation. She has promoted the creation of secure, welcoming areas inside the settlement and integration sector.
Douglas’s appointment is in recognition of her work — “for advancing ideas of fairness and inclusion within the Canadian immigration system as a number one coverage skilled and neighborhood activist.”
“I don’t need to fake that my work in any progressive motion has to do with me solely. It’s at all times a collective effort, and so I believe it supplies an even bigger platform to have the ability to elevate a few of these points and to place a few of them on the general public agenda — problems with migration and race, and migration and sexual orientation,” says Douglas.
She says the appointment can also be vital for her and different Black ladies leaders, “who are sometimes not acknowledged for the work that we do as we proceed to toil in numerous communities and in numerous methods to attempt to make this place the place we reside a greater place, with a lot systemic points round.”
Douglas will proceed to lift points such because the regularization of standing, the systemic racism that exists within the immigration system — for instance, households from Africa are overly DNA examined, she stated —and it permits her and colleagues to concentrate to what’s occurring with refugee claimants, particularly with queer refugees, but additionally different refugees coming from the continent.
She believes that it’s as a result of OCASI, Black neighborhood church buildings and different religion teams, and Black organizations have stepped up in a approach that has by no means been seen earlier than on the African refugee difficulty why there may be some response from the federal authorities to what’s occurring in Sudan with the announcement that it’ll present a household sponsorship program for Sudanese.
“Nonetheless want the federal authorities to step up in an enormous approach, by way of refugee claimants’ shelter and housing, by way of supporting the municipalities the place they’re situated, but additionally in funding issues like a reception centre. They’ve put some cash into and located an area in Peel Area — the $7M shouldn’t be sufficient as a result of we all know there are a whole bunch and a whole bunch of refugee claimants who’re in Ontario, some had been relocated from Quebec, however many others have arrived, within the final 12 months, via Pearson.”
The OCASI govt director stated they may proceed to see folks searching for security as governments in some nations, together with Uganda, Kenya and Ghana, implement draconian legal guidelines that persecute folks primarily based on their sexual orientation.
“We’ve got bought to make sure that the identical reception that we gave to Ukrainians that we’re giving to African refugee claimants. The identical reception that we gave to Ukrainians within the warfare is identical reception that we’re giving to folks in Sudan the place there’s a budding civil warfare, folks from Congo the place unrest has been happening perpetually.”
For a few years, Douglas labored in frontline administration and govt positions with community-based service companies. As a administration guide, she labored each with Non-Governmental Organizations and public establishments on organizational improvement and alter.
She was a member of the provinces’ Professional Panel on Immigration which printed the report, Routes to Success, and led to the province’s first immigration laws (2015); sat as a member of the provincial authorities’s Earnings Safety Reform Working Group (2018); a member of the Immigration and Refugee Advisory Committee of Authorized Help Ontario and the federal authorities’s Nationwide Settlement Council.
Douglas was the co-founder of Zami, a political and assist group for LGBTI Black and Caribbean folks within the early Eighties.
She is the recipient of a number of awards together with the Ladies of Distinction from YWCA Toronto (2004), and the City Alliance on Race Relations Anti-Racism Award (2014), amongst others.
