Canada’s Black Justice Strategy: Changing Systems, Changing Lives
Canada's Black Justice Strategy is a 10-year federal strategy responding to the overrepresentation of Black people in Canada's criminal justice system, built on consultations with more than 1,670 Black Canadians and developed in response to a 2017 United Nations recommendation.
The Strategy is now in its second year
Two Black Canadian advocates know that overrepresentation. Skye Bowen taught teenagers in custody, and lost one of her students six weeks after his release. Leslie Blot was handcuffed on his own front lawn while his three-year-old son watched. Both agreed to tell their story.
What Canada’s Black Justice Strategy Commits To
Building a Future Where Everyone Can Thrive
The Strategy is Canada’s federal response to a documented problem: Black people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, which is what the United Nations pointed to in its 2017 recommendation to Canada. Rather than treating that as a policing problem or a sentencing problem, it treats the whole path through the system as one connected picture, and it was built on what 1,670 Black Canadians said about that path in their own words.
That path is where the Strategy does its work. It covers the social conditions that put people in contact with the system in the first place, then policing, the courts, corrections, and what happens when someone comes home and rebuilds a life in their community. The government’s implementation plan is titled Toward Transformative Change, and it sets out what each of those areas is supposed to look like over 10 years.
Skye Bowen
Black Youth Need More Than a Second Chance
Skye Bowen is a school principal and an advocate for equity and restorative justice, with more than 20 years in education. For over three years of that career, she worked as an educator inside Ontario’s youth corrections system. She met some of the most capable young men she’d ever taught, many of them Black boys who reminded her, she says, of her own children.
She watched them move through a system that didn’t treat them the way it treated youth who weren’t Black: different outcomes, different timelines, for similar sentences.
Six weeks after one of her students was released, he was shot and killed.
Skye calls it a school-to-prison pipeline, years in the making. She’s watched it push young people out of classrooms and into a path that was never inevitable, only unaddressed.
“To lose a young man, knowing that he had possibilities, knowing that he had hope, knowing that he had a family, that wanted to do everything possible, to see his future thrive, and yet we didn’t have a system in place.”
Skye Bowen
Leslie Blot
Racial Profiling on His Own Front Lawn
Leslie Blot is a mortgage broker and a civil rights advocate from Quebec. He has been repeatedly targeted by police because of his race, and has successfully challenged that treatment through official complaints.
In 2017, he was at home in Repentigny, hosting a family barbecue. He and his brother were in the front yard blowing up inflatable play structures for the kids when, he says, a police car drove past three times, then stopped. The officer rolled down his window and said: “What are you doing here? We’ve never seen you here.”
Leslie refused to show ID on his own lawn and started filming. By the end of the encounter, he says, he had a sprained foot, he had been handcuffed in front of his three-year-old son, and he had watched an officer delete the video recordings on his phone. He left with $800 to $900 in tickets and a police report he calls “a bunch of lies.”
The videos had survived in his phone’s trash folder. With support from CRARR (the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations) and a team of lawyers, he filed a complaint, and it paid off. It wasn’t the last time. In 2020, he was racially profiled again, in a Sûreté du Québec stop in Mascouche. Quebec’s police ethics tribunal issued its final ruling earlier in the summer of 2026.
Leslie is 45. He says this has been happening to him since he was 15 or 16.
For me, my dream, how I see the world, is a world where my children, your children and all the children of the world grow up without this pressure, can grow up as equals together in Canada, which is a country of freedom and equality.”
Leslie Blot
These Aren’t Isolated Incidents
Why the Strategy Matters Now
Canada’s Black Justice Strategy is only two years into its funding. Eight years of the 10-year plan remain unfunded.
Skye’s story and Leslie’s story are two out of more than 1,670 that shaped this Strategy. Neither of them is describing something rare. Their experiences are outcomes shaped by systems, which is why the response is a systems-level strategy, not a single policy fix.
Help These Stories Reach More People Across Canada
Skye and Leslie shared their stories because they needed to be heard. Behind the two of them are countless experiences that have never been told at all, by people who never had a camera in front of them and never had anyone ask.
Their experiences put a human face on a systemic problem and help people across Canada understand what Black communities are up against in this country’s justice system.
So share these stories with your community. Start a conversation about Canada’s Black Justice Strategy with someone who hasn’t heard of it yet. And help turn understanding into lasting change – for a stronger system, and a better future for all Canadians.