Black Children and Canadians Are Disappearing —And Still, Not A National Emergency

Where Are Our So-Called Elected Leaders, Especially In The Black Community?

Every single day, another Black Canadian goes missing. Children. Teens. Elders. People with names, faces, families—vanishing into silence while the system turns away. It’s not rare. It’s not random. It’s happening across this country. And still, the people in power say nothing.

No national plan. No public outcry. No coordinated effort to understand or address the growing crisis. Just silence—cold, calculated silence.

Let’s be clear: this is not about blaming law enforcement. Police departments are stretched thin and operate within the limits they’re given. But the decision to declare a national crisis, to build a coordinated response, to sound the alarm—that belongs to elected leaders. The ones with the power. The ones with the podium. The ones with the platform. And overwhelmingly, those leaders have chosen silence.

There is still no reliable federal data tracking how many Black people are missing in Canada. No national database. No reporting framework. No dedicated task force. That’s not just a gap. It’s a deliberate omission. And it’s one of the most disgraceful failures of modern public policy—because what isn’t measured, isn’t seen. And what isn’t seen, gets ignored.

We’ve reached out. Repeatedly over the years to the federal Black caucus. To Black MLAs, MPPs, city councillors, and provincial ministers. And not for something complicated—we asked them to work with us to honour members of the Black community during Black History Month. To recognize excellence. To celebrate legacy. To do the bare minimum of what leadership in the Black community should look like.

And still, they couldn’t be bothered.

With the exception of one federal MP and one provincial minister who followed through and showed up, the rest fell back into silence. Stonewalled. Unresponsive. Disengaged.

So let’s be blunt—if the federal Black caucus and Black elected officials across Canada couldn’t even bring themselves to support an effort to honour their own community during Black History Month, what makes anyone think they’ll lift a finger for a national crisis involving missing Black Canadians?

They won’t. And we’re not wasting time waiting for them to pretend they might.

Let’s also remember the Black officials who actually had power in the last federal government—cabinet ministers, parliamentary secretaries, and even the Speaker of the House. Marci Ien. Ahmed Hussen. Greg Fergus. Others held real influence. Real access. They had seats at the cabinet table. One had the Prime Minister’s ear every single day.

And still—no national campaign. No inquiry. No coordinated push for data collection, tracking systems, public awareness. They were given platforms most Black Canadians can only dream of. And they used those platforms to say absolutely nothing about the children and elders from their own communities vanishing without a trace.

Why? Because their roles were never designed to shake the table. They were there to fill diversity quotas. To offer the optics of progress. But never to be loud. Never to be disruptive. Never to be bold.

And now, with a new Prime Minister already sworn in, we see the pattern continue. Only one Black MP has been appointed to cabinet. One more as a junior minister with a Secretary of State title. That’s it.

Let that sink in.

If that doesn’t speak volumes about how this government truly views Black representation, nothing will. And please—spare us the “most qualified” narrative. That tired, condescending line is used every time they want to justify locking Black voices out of meaningful decision-making roles. At least Trudeau—performative as it was—put multiple Black members in his cabinet. Even if it was more about hitting DEI benchmarks than empowering community voices, it was something.

Now? We can’t even get tokenism. We get a stripped-down version of inclusion that barely makes the optics look good—let alone the policy.

And let’s not hear one more word about the so-called $100 million the federal government “invested” into Black entrepreneurship. That rollout was more tangled in red tape than a crime scene. Mismanaged. Misdirected. And in many ways, more laughable than the phantom funds supposedly allocated for Black media. All it proved is that when it comes to helping Black Canadians, even the money comes with an obstacle course.

We’ve seen how fast governments can move when they care. COVID-19 proved it. Billions flowed. Programs launched. Bureaucracy cut down to nothing. The system can move—it just won’t when it’s Black lives on the line.

And the nonprofit sector? Let’s be honest. Far too many of them exist for the sake of collecting cheques. They look good on paper. They know the right buzzwords. They know how to apply for funding. But when you ask them what they’ve done for missing Black youth, for overlooked elders, for unreported cases—the room goes quiet. Meanwhile, grassroots media, independent journalists, and frontline organizers doing the real work are left out of every funding conversation because they’re not “safe” or “compliant” enough for bureaucratic approval.

We’re not asking anymore. We’re not waiting for Black leaders to decide when it’s politically convenient to show up.

We are launching our own national campaign. One that tells the truth. One that puts faces and names to the growing list of Black people disappearing in this country. One that ensures our people do not become another footnote in someone else’s file. That’s why we’ve launched a GoFundMe—to build a national database and fund investigative journalism that exposes the scale of this crisis and ensures the stories are told loudly, frequently, and fearlessly.

We will not sit by while our people vanish into silence.

There’s a mountain of work ahead—data to collect, families to speak with, stories to document, patterns to uncover. We need every dollar, every share, every voice to help push this forward.

Support this campaign. Share it. Fund it. Speak up. Because the system won’t change unless we force it to. And when the next election comes, don’t forget who showed up when it counted—and who didn’t.

This isn’t about politics. This is about visibility. This is about life and death.

And right now, the silence from our so-called leaders says everything.

If you have information about the whereabouts of any of the featured individuals, please contact law enforcement at 416-808-2222.