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Of the roughly 5 million people who live in British Columbia, nearly 1.7 million identify as visible minorities. Another 1.4 million identify as immigrants, and 1.4 million people’s mother tongue is neither English nor French. 

Despite this diversity in the province, in 2021, reports circulated of increasing instances of racism, with a significant proportion of the local Asian population feeling that racism was getting worse. Beyond lived experience and anecdotes, to what extent is it possible to measure the impact of systemic racism on racialized communities? What sorts of metrics can be applied to racism, if any?

This is what the government of British Columbia is attempting to do. The province’s Anti-Racism Data Act (ARDA) – which received royal assent in 2022, and is the first of its kind in Canada – has the goal of quantifying experiences and impacts of racism on minority communities. In doing so, it hopes to generate concrete, data-driven evidence that can drive more equitable policymaking, particularly in policing, healthcare and education.

“In quantifying the problem of racism, we can be very concrete in guiding government decisions around resourcing, programs and services,” says Parliamentary Secretary Mable Elmore, who is responsible for overseeing anti-racism initiatives in the province.  

British Columbia has historically passed some of the most exclusionary and racist laws in the country, and this legislation is an attempt to understand past harms, and to undo them, says Elmore, who has taken over the post from Rachna Singh. Examples of this institutionalized racism include the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented people of Chinese origin from entering Canada between 1923 and 1947 – and which British Columbia pushed the federal government to pass. 

In 1942, 22,000 Japanese Canadians who lived in the province were also forced into internment camps. The Legislative Assembly of British Columbia notes that “the federal government confiscated their agricultural property and personal possessions and allowed them to be auctioned off or sold at low prices,” which would have had dire long-term financial consequences for the community. 

The ARDA will aim to use disaggregated demographic data – in other words, demographic data broken down into subcategories – to understand the long-term and systemic consequences of racism in public services, as well as how racism affects communities’ ability to fully interact with public services in the first place. However, since the legislation passed in June 2022, what progress has been made? How has the government begun the process of collecting this very sensitive data about racialized communities’ lived experiences in a transparent, safe and equitable way?

Ahead of the first findings and data analysis being published in June 2023, Future of Good sat down with Parliamentary Secretary Elmore to learn more about the progress that has been made since the legislation passed last year. We also called on Kasari Govender, BC’s first independent Human Rights Commissioner, who will seek to hold the government accountable as this legislation is brought to life. 

“This Act is probably late, but it’s better now than never,” says Garrison Duke, president of the board of directors at AMSSA, an association of agencies working with newcomers. “We like data, and anything that can guide us to develop new programs and reach new groups. It should all lead to a more targeted approach to [tackling] issues in the community, whether it’s employment, healthcare or home ownership.”

How did the Anti-Racism Data Act come about and what has been the progress since June 2022?

When Elmore was first elected in 2009, she began asking questions of the government about the experiences of newcomers and racialized youth in the province. She was seeing that the latter had a lower than average graduation rate, which “undermined their chances of future success.” 

“At the time, the response I was getting was that there was no problem, because there was no evidence to suggest they were not doing well,” she remembers. “In other words, we don’t have that problem, because we don’t have the data.” Govender echoes this: “Policymakers are not able to act unless they have evidence in front of them. Reflecting what is happening into numbers can transform into systems change.” 

Following this push for data on experiences of racism, in June 2020, the premier of British Columbia at the time, John Horgan, began talks with the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner on how to begin gathering this information sensitively and equitably. Two existing reports were also pivotal in the drafting of the legislation: The Grandmother Perspective, from the BC Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, which advocated for methods to ensure that disaggregated demographic data had been collected with a duty of care and in partnership with racialized communities; and In Plain Sight, an extensive review of Indigenous peoples experiences with the healthcare system.

More than 13,000 BC residents then participated in consultations about data collection itself, both in focus groups and online, with surveys available in multiple languages. The government consulted seventy community organizations, such as the BC First Nations Justice Council and the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association. It also offered grants of up to $25,000 to community organizations to consult directly with communities and gather perspectives on race-based data collection. Recipients of these grants included the Bangladesh Canada Cultural Association in Victoria, and MOSAIC, a newcomer settlement non-profit. 

Data gathered through these initial community engagement sessions between September 2021 and March 2022 led to the formation of five initial findings reports about how communities felt about demographic data collection in the first instance. Among other recommendations, Indigenous communities called on the BC government to provide a mechanism for them to hold the government itself accountable through the process of data collection, recognizing that data has historically been used “as a colonial process to legitimize colonialism.” 

Engagement with Metis Nation British Columbia also stressed the importance of “distinctions-based language”, where the umbrella term “Indigenous” is often used in data collection. This is “essential to halt the erasure of Metis in BC,” the report summary states. Finally, an online survey that gathered nearly 3000 responses found that over 6 in 10 respondents had reported negative experiences of data sharing. 

These initial consultations on culturally safe data collection were key to the drafting of the ARDA legislation, which stipulates that “an individual’s disclosure of personal information is voluntary, and benefits or services will not be withheld, altered or otherwise limited if the individual declines to provide that personal information…”.

Following the consultations, a post on Rachna Singh’s website from August 2022 outlines that the province then started to collect data on “age, gender, identity and ethnic origin,” in order to “break down barriers and better identify interconnected issues, such as economic status, employment and outcomes in health care.”

The province also brought on an Anti-Racism Data Committee in September 2022, made up of 11 members and led by Dr June Francis, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University. Members include Smith Oduro-Marfo, the lead researcher and author of the Black in BC report, and Jessica (t’łisala) Guss, the leader of strategic initiatives in Indigenous Health for the BC Patient Safety and Quality Council. Govender adds that the province has also brought on a director of Indigenous data governance to help support, implement and build long-term infrastructure around this legislation. 

The initial set of data on experiences of racism and ongoing research priorities are due to be published in June 2023, and will be updated every two years. Crucially, the ARDA forms part of a wider anti-racism strategy that the province is working towards, says Elmore. For instance, in May 2022, Premier John Horgan announced a $100 million initiative to improve health and wellness programmes for internment-era survivors and creating heritage sites in partnership with the National Association of Japanese Canadians. And earlier this year, the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care released the K-12 Anti-Racism Action Plan, which supports changes to school curriculums and anti-racism training in schools. 

The first set of findings is soon to be released – what are some of the open and unanswered questions?

The ARDA signifies a “cross-government effort”, Elmore says. This data collection has the capacity to help the province “review the policing act, reform our justice system, and build Indigenous justice centres. Our intent is to be transformational and dismantle systemic racism.” Govender adds to this, stating that data has shown in Vancouver that an Indigenous man is over 17 times more likely to be arrested than a non-Indigenous man. “We see some significant resistance to the idea that there is systemic racism in policing, and the need to ‘prove’ it,” she says. “The numbers can show the disproportionate impact on racialized communities.” 

Beyond policing and justice, this data has the capacity to provide more equitable public services. For instance, Elmore also mentions that with an aging racialized population in BC, this information could provide vital information on how to create culturally sensitive senior services. It could also transform the child welfare system, in which a high percentage of children are currently from Indigenous families. Instead, the data could reveal how best to support Indigenous families and children. 

Duke adds that one of the primary pain points that AMSSA is hearing from newcomers is that credentials and professional qualifications from their countries of origin are not being recognized by Canadian employers. He’d like to see more support for newcomers to share their skills from their countries of origin, as a means of improving their financial stability. “Data can be used in the right way to find out some of the reasons for these barriers. Could we track how this issue has impacted employment among racialized groups?” 

Although 92 per cent of those surveyed believe that this form of data collection could be positive for their long-term experience of living in BC, there are evidently a number of privacy concerns associated with collecting race-based data. “There were concerns that came up around who is keeping personal information, where it is going to be used and for what purposes,” Elmore says. 

AMSSA, who were consulted by, and continue to be in conversations with, the BC government, have found that one of the main challenges to overcome for the government is building trust. “There has been a lot of lip service, and communities have not seen certain issues being addressed,” Duke says. “People will need to know who their data goes to, and if the data could uncover something that may be embarrassing to the government itself.” He adds that the impact of COVID on marginalized communities was one such example. 

The BC government has reiterated that it will be using the Five Safes model to ensure that nobody’s personal information is at risk. That includes removing personally identifiable information from data, securing it safely and limiting who has access to it, only using it for the purposes of projects that have public benefit, and ensuring that the data is kept private when research outputs are published. 

McMillan, a business law firm with offices around Canada, also published a bulletin when the ARDA was first announced, breaking down some of the key privacy considerations. “In the Act, certain key terms were intentionally left undefined, such as systemic racism and intersectionality. The BC legislature chose not to define systemic racism because systemic racism can look different depending on the communities and it may change over time – meaning that systemic racism must be flexible enough to take its meaning within the context of a particular group.” In the context of privacy, that means communities need to be consistently informed about how their data is being analyzed, and precisely how that relates to dismantling systemic racism in the province. 

As of today, it’s not yet clear exactly which format findings will be published in, and how ongoing data collection will happen beyond the publication of the first findings and research priorities in June 2023. Since data is only going to be published every two years – and the first review of the act is not due to happen until 2027 – the metrics used to measure and track systemic racism will likely stay as moving targets. That also makes it unclear exactly how this data will be applied in policymaking across each ministry individually. 

Govender’s perspective, as the province’s Human Rights Commissioner, is that focusing data collection only on racism is too narrow – in fact, in The Grandmother’s Perspective report, she recommended that the government use data to measure discrimination overall. “I am concerned about the lack of intersectional approaches to the data,” Govender says.

“There is a lot of good intention and thoughtful work going into anti-racism, but I worry about the risk of a non-intersectional approach in reinforcing existing power structures inadvertently.”

She says this data is vital in allowing governments to link interrelating factors that are causing systemic oppression. For example, “we need to be able to understand the distinctions that show the practical ways that income programs impact racialized women in comparison to white men. Otherwise we could end up reinforcing the male norm.” While the province has also stated that age and gender data will form a part of the data collection process, it remains to be seen how these metrics will be published in a way that recognizes intersectionalities in June 2023. 

Elmore also recognizes that one of the primary barriers to effective race-based data collection is a lack of trust in the government, for racialized communities as a whole, and more specifically for Indigenous communities. If data is shared across public bodies, that also raises an “interesting conundrum”, Govender adds, because there is more risk involved in communities not being able to keep track of where their data is being used and analyzed. 

Button, a company building digital services for the government in BC added that “due to a well-deserved mistrust of [the] historical colonial government, some Indigenous people don’t complete the census. Thus we don’t have an accurate picture of everyone, and everyone can’t receive the same services without this important data. Collecting data isn’t the only way. We need to also look at other cultures’ ways of understanding how to serve the needs of everyone in addition to the traditional practice of data collection.”

This is why the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner has proposed that there be a community governance board embedded into the legislation itself, so that communities are able to continuously have a say on how their data is being used by public bodies. Govender gives a particularly insidious example of where releasing data revealed an immediate negative impact on an Indigenous community: following a coronavirus outbreak on a reserve on Vancouver Island, and subsequent reporting of that outbreak, there was heightened and targeted racism towards those with Indigenous status.

“Abstractly, I would love for us all to have access to data – the more data we have, the more we understand about how these [oppressive] systems work,” she adds. “In a perfect world, more data helps, but in reality, we need to take guidance from specific communities.” 

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