Please Click Here to find recent news, events and information from CUPE Ontario.
The Situation in Haiti
CUPE Ontario is committed to working with groups like the Canada Haiti Action Network to support the people of Haiti to live under a government of their own choice. We applaud the resolve of Haitians in resisting attempts to further privatize, militarize and impoverish Haiti.
A little about Haiti’s history:
The first successful slave rebellion in history established the world’s first Black republic in Haiti in 1804. Enslaved Africans rose up in 1791 and vanquished the armies of France, England and Spain. They defeated the most powerful armies in the world at the time, and derailed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, destroyed the French Empire and inspired other people’s movements.
For their courageous actions, Haitians were forced to pay an indemnity of over 150 million francs in reparations to the French! This is the equivalent of 21 billion dollars in today’s terms and took almost 100 years to repay. This is one of the reasons why Haiti is the poorest nation in the Americas. Haiti’s history has left it with a class system where a few wealthy families control the nation. Just as Haiti was trying to recover from this cycle, world powers, such as the US, France, and Canada as well, were already strangling Haiti in other ways. Haiti became a pawn in the Western powers’ fight against Communism, for instance. Papa Doc Duvalier, later branded a brutal dictator, initially won the support of the West because of his opposition to Communism.
Increasingly, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank have pressured Haiti to privatize public assets. Public services, such as education and health care, were partly privatized in the 1990s. Haiti’s agriculture was devastated because it has been forced to allow food to be imported and sold cheaply in the country. Prior to this earthquake, Haiti remained in debt for over a billion dollars. This is why Haiti now has so few resources of its own to cope with even the basic medical needs of its people.
Connection to Canada:
Many of us do not know that Haiti is Canada’s largest aid commitment after Afghanistan. But Canada’s relations with Haiti date back to the 1700s, when both were part of the French Empire. Exchange slowed as France lost its colonies in the New World in the mid-18th Century. Haitians have immigrated to Canada in large numbers since the mid-20th Century. Currently, there are nearly 90,000 Haitian-Canadians, many of whom live in Quebec. And, of course, Canada’s current Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, was herself born in Haiti.
Canadian intervention in Haiti has recently risen dramatically. In 2004, the Canadian government backed the US decision to remove the elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from office. The three intervening powers claimed that Aristide was corrupt and unpopular. Exiled in South Africa, Aristide says that he was forcibly removed because he refused to privatize more of Haiti’s public infrastructure than had already been lost to the private sector in the 1990s and because he was dedicated to improving the lot of the country’s poor.
Click here to return to the main Haiti: After the Earthquake page
