Please be advised that I am a member of the Colour of Poverty/Colour of Change group. 

(Colour of Poverty/Colour of Change (COP/C) is a province-wide initiative made up of individuals and organizations working to build community-based capacity to address the growing racialization of poverty and the resulting increased levels of social exclusion and marginalization of racialized communities across Ontario. Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change works to build concrete strategies, tools, initiatives & community-based capacity through which individuals, groups, organizations - especially those reflective of affected racialized communities themselves - can better develop coherent and effective shared action plans as well as coordinated strategies so as to best work together to address and redress the growing structural and systemic ethno-racial inequality across the province.)

I joined this group because as a woman-of-colour, I found myself consistently being discriminated against with regard to acquiring sustainable employment.
Though I had the qualifications, skills, and experience, I noticed that many people without the qualifications, skills, or experience were being given preferential & consistent employment based on their relationships with the administrators who did the hiring.  In plain words, nepotism was being used to keep me under-employed.  I also was forced to recognize that the administrators were all Caucasians, who while they had acquired their positions over time and with experience, refused to allow such advancement by people-of-colour.

I have listed 3 recommendations:

Recommendation 1:

The Federal government must take a leadership role by acknowledging and addressing systemic barriers to inclusion as well as persistent experience of racial discrimination. This should be achieved by developing and implementing a national poverty reduction strategy with targeted, time-specific and measurable mechanisms and goals and by adopting a racial equity outcome measure and framework to systematically evaluate all of its legislation, policies, programmes and practices as well as all its annual and ongoing budgetary and resource allocation decisions. 

Recommendation 2:

The Federal Government should not only reverse some of the tax cuts that have been implemented to date, but should in fact increase corporate taxation as well  personal taxation for the higher income tax brackets - so that more revenue will become available with which to provide needed services and programs for all Canadians, and especially for those having to live their lives in poverty – with inequitable life chances, life opportunities and life outcomes.

Recommendation 3:

The Federal Government should collect and track disaggregated data across all Ministries, Departments and relevant institutions in order to identify racialized and other structural and systemic disadvantage. With respect to poverty, we need to develop and use clear and common definitions and indicators, in order to get a full and complete picture as to who are the poor in this country, while identifying goals and specific benchmarks and indicators on a cross-sectoral basis, to monitor the labour market related differentials specifically as well as the progress of any poverty reduction plan initiatives as they relate to racialized and other historically disadvantaged and marginalized groups and communities. 

It is my hope that the Federal Government will take a more active role in reducing the poverty which people-of-colour are still enduring as a result of systemic racial-profiling.  It is my hope that we, people-of-colour, will be valued as partners in building an equitable society in Canada.