Essay About Slavery in Canada

Slavery was the dominant condition of life for black people in this country for well over 200 years. So we have been enslaved for longer than we have been free.

Slavery was present in Canada, starting in the 1600s. Infact, for nearly 200 years the act of trading, selling, and torturing slaves was legal and considered normal. The school systems in Canada still struggle to teach the complete and unchanged history of the subject.

Some schools don’t talk enough about about this terrible subject, infact a lot of canadians don't even know that there was slavery in Canada in the first place. If the schools were talking enough about it then at least most people would know that it existed. One of the most surprising things that I had come across during my research is that Paul Martin, a former Prime Minister of Canada who served from 2003 to 2006, didn’t know that it existed. People were appalled that someone so uneducated on the country’s history could get so high in the Canadian government office. There are many things and people to blame for this. The first one would be the school system and the teaching about this subject. The next to blame would be lack of research by Paul Martin himself.

Many people mark Canada as a safe place for African Americans/African Canadians because Canada was the “ending stop” of the underground railroad, but what people don’t know is that infact Canada only abolished slavery 30 years before the United States did.

What a lot of people don't know is that the majority of slaves in Canada were aboriginal rather than African. Around 2⁄3 of slaves were aboriginal and the other 1⁄3 were African, and all together there were 4200 slaves in Canada while there were 305 000 in America. Although there were less slaves in Canada then America, that does not mean that it's any less important. The reason there were less slaves in Canada then in the USA is because of the difference in the 1 Afua Cooper, Historian economies. In Canada, the fur trade was controlled by professionals, and many of the farms were very small and the labour from family members is the only labour needed, so the only people who owned slaves were very rich people who bought them for the use of domestic servants or people who owned large farms.

Thankfully this subject is being brought up and taught more in schools but there is still a lot that has to be done.