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Empower U: Learn to Access Your Disability Rights Training on Canadian Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and its Optional Protocol (OP) training aims to increase awareness of how to address discrimination using more familiar Canadian human rights laws such as Human Rights Codes and the newer international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This is training for persons with disabilities by persons with disabilities. The training is part of a project funded by Employment and Social Development Canada and implemented by the Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD) in collaboration with Canadian Multicultural Disability Centre Inc. (CMDCI), Citizens With Disabilities – Ontario (CWDO), Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities (MLPD) and National Educational Association of Disabled Students (NEADS). Read more.
Everyone has a responsibility to end racism
March 21, 2024 – Ottawa, Ontario – Canadian Human Rights Commission
To mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Charlotte-Anne Malischewski, Interim Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, issues the following statement:
Today on International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Canadian Human Rights Commission is calling for urgent and concrete action to combat all forms of systemic racism in Canada.
Decades after this day’s inception, racism continues to be at the root of human rights violations in countries around the world, including Canada. Whether conscious or unconscious, subtle or overt, individual or systemic, racism diminishes human dignity and erodes democracy.
Systemic racism in Canada runs deep. The barriers created by Canada’s systems and structures may not be intentional or malicious, but they exist and they have significant impacts. In Canada, Indigenous, Black, and other racialized people continue to experience greater poverty, unemployment, violence, inadequate housing and homelessness, and food insecurity.
Canada’s multicultural population means that racist expressions, and the roots of racial intolerance cut across diverse communities. For example, there has been a troubling rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Palestinian racism, especially since October 7, 2023.
Canada has domestic and international obligations to combat systemic racism. The right to be free from racial discrimination is enshrined in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and international treaties.
We call on governments and all other institutions across Canada to look inwards, prioritize self-education, challenge biases, fears, and assumptions about race, and to take meaningful, concrete action.
Everyone has a responsibility to end racism in Canada.
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Quick facts
The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is rooted in the era of the South African apartheid and commemorates what is now known as the Sharpeville Massacre — the violent and deadly attack on a peaceful protest in Sharpeville, South Africa, in 1960.
While 2024 will mark the end of the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent, Canada committed on February 7, 2024 to extending this work until 2028.
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Some members of the CCD team at the Supreme Court of Canada on April 25, 2018 to intervene in S.A. v. Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation. (L. to R. Bob Brown, CCD Human Rights Committee member, Dianne Wintermute, legal counsel (ARCH), Dahlia James, a second year JD candidate at U. of Ottawa and Prof. Ravi Malhotra’s Research Assistant and Luke Reid, legal counsel (ARCH) , and Prof. Ravi Malhotra, a member of the Human Rights Committee, Prof. Anne Levesque, Chair of the Human Rights Committee, and Erin Carr, a second year JD candidate.
The Latimer Case
The Latimer case directly concerned the rights of persons with disabilities. Mr. Latimer's view was that a parent has the right to kill a child with a disability if that parent decides the child's quality of life no longer warrants its continuation. CCD explained to the court and to the public how that view threatens the lives of people with disabilities and is deeply offensive to fundamental constitutional values. Learn more.