Black Lives Matter Canada

Taxpayers spend over $41 million per day collectively on police services across the country. This does not include spending on the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, railway and military police, and government departments enforcing specific statutes in the areas of income tax, customs and excise, immigration, fisheries and wildlife. In engaging in these policing practices, police forces across the country routinely engage in surveillance against Black and Indigenous People, constrain our movements, harm and kill us. We believe that Black communities, and all communities, deserve better.

The $41 million per day that is being spent on policing is not creating safer, more secure communities. This funding can be reallocated to create safer and more secure societies for all of us, and to rid Black and Indigenous communities of a serious threat to our safety.

We can and should have an emergency service that people can call if they are experiencing mental distress. We can and should disarm police, like the United Kingdom does, and like Oakland has committed to do. We can and should invest in shelters for people who are experiencing gender-based violence, so that the 300 women who are turned away from shelters each night in Canada have a place to go. We can and should create an emergency service for survivors and victims of sexual assault that will actually support them, instead of relying on the police forces in this country who have been routinely accused of sexual misconduct. We can and should provide nurturing educational environments, free of police interacting with our children without parental supervision. We can and should decriminalize drug use, and take a public health approach to providing support for those who need it. We can and should stop policing poverty, and reinvest funding into social housing, free transit, and food security. We can and should create a world where we all feel safe, and we all get what we need to live a life of dignity. And we can start that process by taking the funding that we currently waste on policing, and reinvest it in creating the safety and security we all need.

We are working toward the abolition of the police and toward a society where we can all be safe. While this is focused on law enforcement, we are also calling to defund jails, prisons, immigration detention centres, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA).

We are calling for a reinvestment into Black, Indigenous, racialized, impoverished, & other targeted communities.

We can defund the police, demilitarize the police, remove police from our schools, and invest in alternative approaches to creating safety and security for all of us.

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Black Lives Matter Canada