On March 25, 2026, 123 nations rose in the United Nations General Assembly Hall to declare the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity in recorded history.
Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama spoke on behalf of the African Group. Barbados’s Poet Laureate, Esther Philips, told the delegates: “There are spirits of the victims of slavery present in this room at this moment, and they are listening for one word only: justice.“
Canada abstained. Not voted against. Abstained—which, in the grammar of international bodies, is its own kind of statement.
Fifty-two nations abstained, most of them European. Three voted against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. Canada chose the company of silence over the company of witness. It did so in the same week that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms received royal assent in the UK, 44 years ago, along with the Canada Act 1982.
I want to hold that before moving anywhere else, because it is not an aberration. It is a pattern. And the pattern has a history that goes back not four decades but five centuries—a history that historian Bryan Palmer has spent three volumes beginning to tell. His first volume, Colonialism and Capitalism: Canada’s Origins 1500-1890, published in September 2024, and his second, Capitalism and Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960, published last month, document the structural relationship between Canada’s economic foundations and the colonial violence that built them.
The slave abstention is not a diplomatic misstep. It is the latest entry in a ledger accumulating since 1628, when the first recorded slave sale took place in New France. Atlantic Canada fed Caribbean slave plantations for generations. Much of the capital that established what became Scotiabank and CIBC came from supplying those slave colonies. Nova Scotia privateer vessels protected a market that depended on enslaved labour.
Canada did not stand apart from the slave economy. It was one of its suppliers.
The Charter does not erase this history. It gives citizens the tools to confront it. What the Carney government’s abstention tells us is that the tools are being set aside, deliberately, in the precise week they are most needed.
The Greengrocer and the Gap
On January 20, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood at the World Economic Forum in Davos and delivered a speech that received the kind of reverent approval reserved for leaders who sound serious about global responsibility. He invoked Václav Havel. He described the Czech dissident’s greengrocer—the shopkeeper who places “Workers of the world unite” in his window every morning, not because he believes it, but to signal compliance, to avoid trouble, to get along. Havel called this “living within the lie.” Carney said the bargain no longer works. He said Canada was taking the sign out of the window.
Then he said something that, applied consistently, would require a complete reversal of Canadian foreign policy.
He said middle powers must hold a “principled commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights.” He said they must act “consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals.” He said that when middle powers criticise economic intimidation from one direction while staying silent when it comes from another, they are keeping the sign in the window.
These are his words. I am going to use them as the measuring instrument for everything that follows.
Al Jazeera columnist Andrew Mitrovica reached his verdict before the evidence was even complete. Writing on March 9, 2026, he argued that Carney’s support for the US-Israel war on Iran — a war prosecuted without UN Security Council authorisation, in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — dissolved his reputation for measured statecraft within weeks of the Davos speech. Mitrovica noted the contrast with Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who refused to allow US forces to use Spanish bases, rejected the war as dangerous folly with a direct line to the Iraq disaster, and did not flinch when Trump threatened to cut trade with Spain over the decision. Carney chose differently. He is, Mitrovica concluded, “simply its more articulate custodian”—the custodian of the politics of expediency he promised to transcend.
Bryan Palmer’s thesis, developed across his first two volumes, is that Canada’s self-image — pluralistic, peacekeeping, rule-of-law committed, a moral voice among nations — has always coexisted with its actual conduct, shaped by the imperatives of colonial capitalism from the beginning. The contradiction is not new. It is structural. Carney’s Havel moment was not built on a foundation of Canadian integrity. It was built on the same foundation Palmer documents: the performance of values while pursuing interests. The greengrocer’s sign, reframed as a speech about removing the greengrocer’s sign.
The full documented record of that performance—the arms exports, the bank being built to finance the next generation of military procurement, and the surveillance architecture those investments are designed to scale—is the subject of the companion piece to this article, The Battle-Tested State.
What the Charter piece asks is the prior question: what kind of country makes those choices, and what in its history makes them legible?
The Charter at Home, in the Week of Its Anniversary
Section 2 of the Charter guarantees freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association. Section 15 guarantees equality before the law without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, or age.
On March 12, 2026, the federal government forced the House of Commons’ Justice Committee to conclude its study of Bill C-9—the Combatting Hate Act—and gave the House a maximum of two days for Report stage and Third Reading. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association called it “a procedural power play” that should alarm every Canadian who cares about democratic practice and free expression.
More than 40 civil society organizations had already warned that Bill C-9’s vague language could criminalize peaceful protest, enable pre-emptive restriction of expression before any offence is committed, and create a mechanism that history shows gets used against Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, and dissidents. The truncated committee process, the CCLA noted, made the bill worse—removing the Criminal Code’s good-faith religious defence without putting anything adequate in its place.
Ontario’s Minister of Education issued a memo limiting expressive rights in schools. Toronto Police sought to ban protest from public streets. The CCLA intervened in both cases. CBC documented that RCMP surveillance of BC First Nations communities dates to the 1970s—the policing of Indigenous peoples, whose dispossession, as Palmer’s first volume records, was not incidental to Canadian state-building but central to it, carried out under the Indian Act more than a century before the Charter existed.
This is the same government that invoked Charter values at Davos. This is the same government rushing through legislation, in the week of the Charter’s 44th anniversary, that the country’s leading civil liberties organization says will harm the communities Section 15 was written to protect.
The Charter did not interrupt the colonial pattern Palmer documents. It gave citizens the legal tools to do so themselves. What the Carney government is doing in the same week it will celebrate the Charter’s anniversary is making those tools harder to use.
The Gesture and What It Conceals
On July 30, 2025, Prime Minister Carney issued a statement recognizing the State of Palestine. Recognizing Palestinian statehood is a meaningful diplomatic step, and I acknowledge it as such. One hundred and forty-six countries had already done so. Canada was not leading — it was following, late and partially.
But the question the gesture raises is not whether it was welcome. It is what it means when a government recognizes a Palestinian state with its right hand while its left hand continues to authorize military exports to the government whose policies are making that state’s existence less possible with every passing month.
When Carney used the word “Zionist” in public remarks and was criticized by the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council, he replied that he used the term “to refer to those who support the existence of the state of Israel.”
This is a deliberate conflation of a political ideology with a position on statehood — precisely the definitional slippage that Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the Jewish Faculty Network, and legal scholars have documented as a mechanism for insulating Israeli government policy from scrutiny by wrapping it in the language of Jewish identity. It does not protect Jewish Canadians. It conscripts their identity into service of a foreign government’s policy.
A government that recognizes Palestinian statehood while continuing arms exports to Israel, while operating a military base in Kuwait assisting the US-Israel war on Iran, while abstaining on a UN resolution condemning the gravest crime against humanity — that government is not pursuing a two-state solution. It is managing the optics of one.
The Sign Is Still in the Window
There is a direct line from the first recorded slave sale in New France in 1628, to the Atlantic provinces feeding Caribbean slave plantations, to Canada’s abstention on the slavery reparations resolution on March 25, 2026. That line is not moral equivalence between events. It is the thread of a structural pattern: a country that has consistently served the interests of colonial capitalism while describing itself in the language of human rights, peace, and the rule of law.
The Black Canadians Civil Society Coalition heard that abstention clearly. “Recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity is not symbolic,” said Hodan Ahmed, co-founder of the Coalition. “It is foundational to advancing reparative justice, confronting anti-Black racism, and upholding the very principles Canada claims to champion on the global stage.“
Melak Gebresilassie, racial justice campaigner with Amnesty International Canada, was equally direct: “Canada must choose clarity over comfort.” For Black Canadians — descendants of enslaved Africans, Black Loyalists, and people with direct and living ties to the legacies of plantation slavery — this was not a vote on a historical abstraction. It was a message from their government about whether their suffering and its ongoing consequences are counted as real.
Canada answered, “Abstention.”
Human Rights Watch described the vote as underscoring a continuing divide between Global South countries experiencing the enduring consequences of colonial atrocities and many Global North countries unwilling to take responsibility.
Alfred de Zayas, a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as UN Independent Expert on International Order from 2012 to 2018, has documented this divide across decades of UN voting records — resolution by resolution, year by year — as the most reliable empirical measure of what states actually believe rather than what they say. The pattern Canada’s abstention reflects is not new. It is, as Palmer’s two volumes document, structural.
What would Canada look like if the Charter were also foreign policy?
It would impose a full arms embargo on Israel under the Arms Trade Treaty, as 173 former Canadian diplomats called for, as UN experts demanded, and as Canada’s own export law requires given the ICJ’s findings. It would vote in favour of UN resolutions consistent with international law, including those calling for reparations for the gravest crime against humanity.
It would withdraw from military operations assisting a war prosecuted in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.
It would protect the press freedom guaranteed under Section 2(b) of the Charter — which means responding when Shurat HaDin, an Israeli lawfare organisation whose founder has publicly described a collaborative operational relationship with the Mossad, sends demand letters to payment processors and demand letters to Ontario law enforcement calling for a criminal investigation and the shutdown of The Maple, a Canadian independent news outlet, for publishing journalism about Canadians who served in the Israeli military.
And it would withdraw Bill C-9 for substantive revision, because you cannot honour the Charter’s 44th anniversary by rushing through legislation that the CCLA says will be turned against the very people Section 15 was written to protect.
These are not aspirations. They are obligations that flow from instruments Canada has already signed: the Charter, the Arms Trade Treaty, the UN Charter, the Rome Statute, and the Genocide Convention. Carney cited the UN Charter at Davos. These are its requirements.
The Latin root of passion is passio: suffering. Right beside it sits com-passion: suffering together. A passionate call for justice does not mean strong emotion alone. It means a profound and personal reckoning with human suffering, past and present, and a commitment to respond truthfully and act accordingly. Human suffering is not locked in history. It is not a brand, a hierarchy, or a political instrument. It is a call.
The Charter turns 44 on April 17. It was earned, not given. It can be lost. The first step toward losing it is the moment a government invokes it at Davos while doing the opposite at home and abroad, and no one makes them answer for the gap.
That is our work. As citizens. As readers. As people who refuse to keep the sign in the window.
