It’s in the Billions
The Russians call it Maskirovka. It’s known by the Japanese a Scorpion Maneuver. Old school Jamaicans refer to is as a “Puppet Show.”
It’s a military maneuver of distracting your enemy by keeping them focused on a particular battle while moving your large-scale main force units into a flanking position to surprise and crush the enemy. Thus, winning the war.
The City of Halifax and the government of Nova Scotia used this maneuver brilliantly. The Maskirovka was Street Checks. The large-scale main force was Billions of dollars being poured into Halifax for infrastructure and economic development. The victims were the Black population of Halifax.
Just in the past last decade, the Black population in Halifax has suffered through the horrific, illegal action of Street Checks. According to University of Toronto, Prof Scott Wortley, 9-1 in comparison to the White population. The physical and psychological damage cannot be quantified. However, the economic cost can.
Just in the last few years, the push to stop Street Checks reached its full tilt. Before the protest that ushered in the moratorium on Street Checks, there were countless community meetings and consultations. However, during that same time, the City of Halifax and the Province orchestrated an economic plan that saw them recipients of billions of federal dollars for infrastructure and development.
Street Checks is where the Black community got the wool pulled over our eyes. While we were lobbying the government to be treated as human beings and not subjected to illegal treatment from the same entity that’s supposedly there to protect us, they were amassing billions to gentrify and economically crush us.
The long fight to ban Street Checks has fatigued the Black community to the point of exhaustion, and now that the battle has been partially won, we have awoken late to an economic climate in which we are ill-equipped to weather.
902 ManUp is hosting a community panel discussion with government Monday, November 18th at the North Branch Library with the African Nova Scotian Affairs, the Halifax Police Chief and the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission.
To our Black youth… Remember, you are the ones that grabbed the ball and got it passed the goal line — Big Ups to you. When you meet on Monday, remind the government of not only the phycological trauma of Street Checks but the economic one. They pulled the wool over our eyes while they got fat economically. Financial institutional restoration to the Black community is not only justified but necessary.
List of only a few government funding projects:
August 2016: $54 Million infrastructure upgrades
April 2018: $828 Million as part of the “Invest in Canada Plan”
March 2019: $26 Million for infrastructure spending
June 2019: $46 Million to upgrade Port of Halifax and infrastructure upgrades
March 2019: $86.5 Million for infrastructure spending to “ease traffic”
August 2019: $500 Million to Irving Shipbuilding for maintenance
Just to name a few.
We’ve always told to you racism is economic.