Activists Say Canada’s Ski Hills, Hiking Trails Lack Diversity

A sure sign of immigrant assimilation into a host society is the tendency to identity oneself wholly and completely with that society – in other words, to perceive oneself as indistinguishable from that society. While many immigrants do just this, there also exists in this country an entire industry of activists dedicated to the exact opposite idea. Let’s take a look at a few of the activists on a permanent crusade to promote a vision of Canada in which immigrants identify very strongly with their minority ethnocultural group.

“Colour the Trails”: Not enough BIPOC hikers?

The last time that you went skiing, did you worry about the lack of BIPOC representation on the slopes? Or, are you a normal person who tends not to spend too much time thinking about the demographic breakdown of winter leisure activities?

Colour The Trails describes itself as “a national Black woman owned business, focused on improving access to outdoor activities for BIPoC (including those who lay within the intersection of BIPoC and 2SLGBTQAI+ community) adventurers”. Other initiatives include “Colour the waves” (including canoeing and dragon boat racing ), “Colour the Slopes” (including cross country skiing and ice climbing), “Colour the Sails”, and “Wellness in Colour”.

One of their goals is to “change the outdoors industry to be a more inclusive space” – but not by “seeking to assimilate into the existing outdoors culture”. Instead, they aim to “challenge inequity, dismantle barriers, create representation”. Chatelaine recently published a profile on the group:

“When Judith Kasiama started joining group hikes in the Vancouver area in the summer of 2016, she noticed a few things right away: Other hikers had top-of-the line clothing and gear, they hiked faster than she did and the groups weren’t very diverse. The outings were usually led by white people, and she was often the only Black woman present. ‘I just didn’t find it as inclusive as it could be,’ she says.”

Their partners include government departments like Parks Canada and Ontario Parks, as well as outdoor industry companies such as North Face, Arc’teryx, and Altitude Sports.

“Global citizens” in Newfoundland

If you have had the good fortune to visit Newfoundland, or if you are a Newfie yourself, do you worry that institutions on The Rock do not sufficiently encourage multiculturalism? The odds are low that this ranks high on the list of concerns for most of the province’s residents, but not to worry – activists are always there to fill the gap left by those major oversights!

CBC published a short profile of Sa’adatu Usman, a Nigerian immigrant who has lived in St John’s since 2022. She describes the mission of her non-profit, “Global Citizen Inc.”:

“As part of her work, Usman has been working on a project helping junior high school students learn to accept themselves as global citizens. Usman said that she has seen children struggle with self-worth due to racism in schools. ‘So I am teaching them to embrace themselves. Be who you are,’ she said. She also is trying to show students the vast array of cultures and perspectives across the world, so they don’t feel like they have to look or act a certain way.”

Diversifying Canada’s pharmacies

When you go to a pharmacy, what is your top concern: that it is well stocked and provides good service, or that the composition of its staff represents the overall racial demographics of the Canadian population in the most recent census?

Shoppers Drug Mart published a short promotional on its website about Nneka Ezurike, an associate-owner of four Shoppers Drug Mart locations in Toronto who is concerned about what the promotional describes as a “lack of diversity in the pharmacy sector” in Canada. As Ezurike puts it:

“The pharmacy profession should reflect the community it serves – and the Black population in Canada continues to grow with each census. It is also vital that pharmacists and other healthcare professionals understand the health disparities that Black Canadians experience as a result of anti-Black racism, and be positioned to provide culturally appropriate care”.

In 2023, Ezurike co-founded Black Pharmacy Professionals of Canada, which according to Shoppers Drug Mart “now consists of 200 members, among them retired and licensed pharmacists, International Pharmacy Graduates (IPGs), technicians and students”. Ezurike sums up her mission as follows:

“I want to help create a more inclusive and equitable environment by contributing to initiatives that aim to address discrimination, biases and marginalization. Studies have shown that increasing the diversity of healthcare professionals has been associated with increased access to care and better outcomes not only for underserved minorities, but the population as a whole”.

United citizens, or a Tower of Babel?

This is just a sampling of the large constellation of groups and figures in Canada promoting a wide variety of minority ethnocultural interests – or more accurately, what activists claiming to represent those minorities say are their interests. The pool of examples is virtually endless.

The World Sikh Organization released an election guide for the 2025 election campaign demanding extensions to expiring visas, more permanent residency pathways, and much more. Ontario is spending $70 million in taxpayer funds on a planned “Sikh-Punjabi” long-term care home in Brampton which will reportedly make fluency in Punjabi a job requirement. As recently as January, Poilievre was promising the Sikh diaspora that he would work to establish direct flights to Amritsar, a city in the Indian state of Punjab.

The worldview of the general public provides a stark contrast to this, with a November 2023 Leger poll finding that 55% of Canadians endorse the idea of “encouraging newcomers to embrace broad mainstream values and traditions and leave behind elements of their cultural identity that may be incompatible with that”. Only 26% of respondents supported the idea of “encouraging newcomers to maintain and promote their own cultural and religious identities”.