On June 19th, our American neighbours celebrated Juneteenth, a day that celebrates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in 1865. Proclaimed a federal holiday by President Joe Biden last year, Juneteenth got quite a lot of attention, even in Canada. A federal holiday of our own was also made official in 2021: Emancipation Day is celebrated on August 1st, but many Canadians still don’t know what it’s all about.
There are still people in this country who believe that we never had slavery here. Technically, we didn’t have slavery in Canada, but only because “Canada” came into being in 1867, after slavery was abolished in virtually all the colonies in the Americas. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t enslaved people on this territory when it was called British North America, or before that, New France.
It's easy to tell ourselves that slavery was a Southern institution, that the Northern British colonies, including those in present-day Canada, were opposed to it. In fact, the Abolitionist movement only got going in the late 18th century, 200 years after the first settlements were established in the New World by English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese colonists. All of these empires participated in the transatlantic slave trade which began around 1500.
It is fair to say that we didn’t have slave ownership in the same numbers in Canada as they had in the United States, but that is a far cry from having none. And surely even one enslaved person is too many.
Although France prohibited slavery on its own shores, in 1688, Louis XIV granted New France’s petition to begin importing people from West Africa as slaves. Although no shipments ever actually came directly from West Africa to Nouvelle France, colonists here acquired slaves from other French and British colonies.
Britain was similar: it was not very common to see enslaved people in the mother country, but the British empire was built on the backs of enslaved people working on cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations in the Caribbean, North and South America.
Well before the British conquered the French in North America in 1760, there were already many people living in slavery in New France. Some were of African descent; others were Indigenous.
As Canadians, we may decide that June 19, 1865 is not a significant date for us (although there are many Canadians who are descended from former American slaves), but we might want to pay attention to a few other dates:
In 1794, Revolutionary France abolished slavery throughout its empire, only to have it reinstituted by Napoleon in 1802. (Haiti declared itself independent from France in 1804 and became the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery). The French re-abolished slavery throughout their empire in 1848.
Britain (and the United States) outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, meaning they would cease the practice of kidnapping and enslaving free African people, but this law made no change to the status of the hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions- already living in slavery in British colonies. (Several Northern states and the province of Ontario did outlaw or limit slavery in the late 1700s).
In 1833, Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire including in British North America.
This is our history of slavery. It was legal and existed in much of what we now call Canada and Quebec from the earliest settlements in the 1500s up to 1833. We got the jump on abolition over the United States by about 30 years. That’s hardly a source of bragging rights, and a far cry from the erroneous claim that we never had slavery here.
The Slavery Abolition Act came into effect throughout the British empire on August 1st, 1834. This August 1st, we should go ahead and celebrate 188 years since emancipation, as long as we recognize the history of slavery, right here at home, that necessitated an act to abolish it.
August 1st is not just a Canadian holiday. Emancipation Day is celebrated throughout the former British Empire. In 1985, Trinidad and Tobago became the first country to officially declare it a national holiday .
The internet has lots of resources to learn more. Here are just a couple: Montecristo Magazine ; Canadian Heritage
Image: Black Canadians celebrate Emancipation Day in Amherstburg, Ontario in 1894. Photo by Andrew Merrilees/Library and Archives Canada.