Post-emancipation racial governance and institutional segregation

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, newly free Black Loyalists and War-of-1812 refugees, promised land and equality for military service, were met with curtailed allotments, wage suppression, and white mob violence, including the 1784 Shelburne riot (Maynard, 2025). The post-abolition settlement affirmed a racial order in which Black life was tolerated as labour while denied civic belonging, helping explain durable mistrust in public institutions among descendants and later Black migrants (Sharpe, Aqil, et al., 2024). Segregated schooling, legally enabled by the 1840 Act of Union and entrenched by Ontario’s 1850 Common Schools Act, lasted in parts of Canada into the late twentieth century (Howard & Smith, 2011)Footnote 1.

In housing and public spaces, sundown restrictions, municipal bylaws, and business practices barred Black presence. Police enforced the colour line, the legally and socially imposed boundary that determined where Black people could live, work, travel, and gather relative to white people (Howard & Smith, 2011), as in the arrest of Viola Desmond in 1946 (Reynolds, 2016). These arrangements normalized the routine restriction of Black movement and access to public life, conditions that research has since documented as direct contributors to today’s uneven exposure to harm. Black gun violence survivors and those bereaved by homicide continue to encounter the weight of these historical patterns when they seek help: in police responses shaped by racial profiling and institutional mistrust (Wortley & Owusu-Bempah, 2022; Sharpe, 2015); in court processes that question the credibility of Black victims and minimize their losses (Owusu-Bempah & Jeffers, 2021; Saghbini & Paquin-Marseille, 2023); and in encounters with victim services. Victim services include government-funded programs, police and court-based supports, and community-based organizations operating across provinces and territories, as well as provincial victim compensation programs that provide financial assistance to eligible victims of violent crime. For a comparative overview of victim service structures, eligibility criteria, compensation programs, and delivery models across Canadian jurisdictions, see the 2024 report on Victim Services in Canada (https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/vsc-savc/index.html), which documents the substantial variation in service provision across provinces and territories (Department of Justice Canada, 2024). These barriers are not isolated experiences; they have been documented in community consultations and survivor-centred research across Canada (Jeffers, 2023; Sharpe, Aqil, et al., 2024; Sharpe et al., 2025). The sections that follow illustrate each of these barriers in greater depth, drawing on evidence from both populations to show how historical patterns of exclusion continue to shape the experiences of Black survivors navigating systems that were not designed with their needs in mind.