John McKay
Hon. John McKay
Member of Parliament for Scarborough—Guildwood
Emancipation Day
August 6, 2020
August 1st each year commemorates Emancipation Day, when slavery was outlawed in the British Empire in 1834. In the nineteenth century, slavery was the economic underpinning of the British Empire and to attack this moral scourge was to simultaneously attack the very basis of wealth creation. This legislation attracted fierce resistance from those who relied on slavery.

British Member of Parliament William Wilberforce (pictured on the right) worked tirelessly to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. Starting in 1789, Wilberforce introduced multiple bills in Parliament designed to abolish the slave trade. In March 1807 the Abolition of Slave Trade Act (pictured below) passed into law, thus undermining the very economic basis of the British Empire. Having succeeded in abolishing the slave trade, he then turned his attention and formidable energies to the abolition of slavery itself. 

 

Wilberforce and his supporters felt that the moral scourge was so strong that it took them several efforts to pass legislation. The first attempts were dramatic failures, but through the combination of luck and understanding how the parliamentary system worked, they finally passed legislation in July 1833, just days before his death, Parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Bill. Wilberforce never served in cabinet.

Regrettably, while Wilberforce’s legislation turned the tide against the sale and transportation of slaves, these efforts did not lead to the end of global slavery. In fact, there are far more slaves in the world today than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By some estimates, more than 40 million people are currently enslaved around the globe.

 
In 2020, I would like to believe that the world is free of the moral scourge of slavery, but this is not true:
  • $15 billion (US) worth of goods at-risk of being produced by modern slavery are imported into Canada annually
  • 1,200 companies operating in Canada import goods produced by modern slavery
  • Canada imports over $390 million (US )worth of fish from countries suspected of having modern slavery in their fishing industries.

Just as Wilberforce attacked slavery obliquely by abolishing the trade rather than slavery in some respects, the Modern Slavery Bill I introduced with my friend and colleague Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne in the Senate tries to do the same thing. The Modern Slavery Bill forces large organizations to examine and disclose any slavery in their supply chains and publish a statement to that affect. It is a modest bill, but it does attack the economic underpinnings of Canadian society mainly through the acquisition of cheap products for which the human cost is substantially discounted. The bill would ban imports of goods made by slave labour and impose fines on companies that fail to comply. Sadly, slavery is still with us; as Canadians we must redouble our efforts to end slavery.

As Wilberforce once said, “you may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” If this Bill becomes law, Canadians will not be able to say that they did not know. The question is, will they care enough to recognize the history of Emancipation Day and change their purchasing decisions?

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