Please note: Sunday Service on February 16th has moved onto zoom due to the weather, 10:00 AM only - link here

E-News Update February 7, 2025
A Message from The Rev. Dr. James Shire
Dear friends in Christ
As we continue through Black History Month, let's reflect on African slavery in Canada. Canada takes great pride in being the endpoint for the 19th-century Underground Railroad, helping enslaved Black individuals escape the American South to freedom. Although slavery was outlawed in the British Empire in 1834, it was legal and practiced in Canada until then, with the Anglican Church playing a role in maintaining this system.
Many Canadians assume African slavery was just an American or Caribbean problem. Canada lacked the climate for large cash crop plantations like those in the American South and Caribbean. However, from 1629 to 1834, over 4,000 enslaved Africans lived in what became Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island,
and New Brunswick. Certainly the institution grew after the American Revolution when many Loyalists brought their slaves to Canada, but even before then the wealthy elites (including clergy) in Quebec City owned both Black and Indigenous slaves. From 1793 to 1834, many enslaved people fled to northern U.S. states as some began outlawing slavery. Although smaller in scale than in the U.S. or Caribbean, African slavery existed in Canada, and its impact is still felt today.
While the Anglican Church of Canada has done a fair amount of work in its efforts to reconcile with the First Nations peoples, there has been less reflection about how Anglicans in Canada participated in and benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Now, there are some murky waters to this, before 1861the Anglican Church of Canada was an extension of the Church of England in North America: bishops were appointed, and priests supplied by the church in England, and funding for the church came from the British Parliament (unlike the fully autonomous and independent Episcopal Church in the US). So, while the Church of England and its missionary arms like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was an active participant in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, determining the scale and scope that Anglican clergy in Canada participated in it is somewhat difficult because where does the Church of England end and the Anglican Church of Canada begin. In 2022, the Dismantling Racism Task Force urged the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada to research and confront its historical role in slavery.
While we celebrate the ways in which the Black community enriches both the Church and society at large, we must also then reflect on how racism still inhabits the DNA of the Church and society. Br Reginald Crenshaw, OHC, said in 2020 on behalf of the Black Anglicans of Canada organization “Our commitment is to dismantle all vestiges of racism and other inequities in our church and the larger society. However, to do that we must be specific in our naming what we want to dismantle, which is a new way of saying what we envision as our preferred future for our life as a society. We must recognize the importance of naming and confronting anti-Black racism in the process. Why? Because unless we name the specificity of the racism, that is, anti-Black racism, we remain unclear about goals and objectives. Racism in the diaspora begins with the experience of slavery. Apartheid and the colonial forms of oppression have their root in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its forced removal of Black men and women from their homes and cultures into the culture of slavery, Jim Crow, racial segregation and oppression—all of which recalibrated the definition of who is human and who is not human. This redefining experience is rooted in that specificity, that people—that is, Black people. It is the DNA experience of the cultures of North America, South America and the Caribbean.” This process of building a more just church and society requires the explicit naming and understanding of the different forms and histories of anti-Black racism throughout history and then working to build the necessary bridges of reconciliation and justice.
Sincerely
James+
Interim Associate Priest