Former President of the Ontario Black History Society Opts for the Political Arena

By Neil Armstrong

I am sharing some stories about Black candidates in the upcoming Ontario general election that I wrote earlier in the year.

Photo contributed   Niikki Clarke, Ontario NDP candidate, Mississauga Malton.

 

Nikki Clarke, the immediate past president of the Ontario Black History Society (OBHS), an entrepreneur and educator, will be the New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate for the new riding, Mississauga Malton, in the provincial general election on June 7.

 

She says her decision to run happened organically as she had been involved in the community for many years as an educator and volunteering with several programs.

Last January, Andrea Horwath, the leader of the Ontario NDP, attended the annual OBHS kick-off brunch for Black History Month and they spoke for a few minutes.

A few weeks later she got a call from the NDP to meet with Horwath at her Queen’s Park office on March 8, International Women’s Day. 

“I sat down and we spoke and connected and I realize that we had a lot of commonality. She has a very disarming kind of manner about her which makes people feel very comfortable.”

The NDP leader told Clarke that the party had been watching her over the years as a community worker and was very proud of what she had been able to accomplish as president of the OBHS.

She was also told that it has been the mandate of the party for a number of years to reach out to women, especially women of colour in the community, “to see if they could do more by becoming civically minded and in doing more on the political level.”

Horwath asked her if she would consider becoming a candidate for the NDP and after pausing for a few seconds Clarke decided that this was a great way of showing how much of a passion she has for the community.

“I’m very grateful that the NDP has been behind me being very supportive and also being able to show me the tools to equip me to do this candidacy very well.”

On September 27 she won unanimously the nomination for the candidacy in Mississauga Malton and has been in pre-campaign mode from that time.

Clarke says constituents in her riding are concerned about issues such as the shortage of affordable housing, joblessness, and precarious work.

She said she is very vocal about the attention to families and children who are in the special needs community.

Recently, she attended the Abilities Expo at the International Centre and said there was great dissatisfaction at how the provincial government treats people with disabilities. 

Clarke said she is very passionate about addressing this issue once she is elected and will continue to fight against anti-black racism.

“These are just some of the parts of why it is important for me to run as a woman, why it’s important for me to run as a black woman and why it’s important for me to mobilize people in the Black community to make effective change by getting out and voting.”

The founder of the Nikki Clarke Network, an online television network, was born in Kingston, Jamaica and came to Canada with her parents in 1970. 

Her mother, Patricia Clarke, is from St. Elizabeth so she spent a lot of her early childhood in Black River and her father, Peter Clarke, is from Barton, St. Catherine.

She said Montreal was the port of entry for West Indians who came in the 1970s when immigration policies were being drafted and approved by the Pierre Trudeau-lead Liberal government.

Her family settled in an all-white, all-French neighbourhood and as a young child she had to acclimatize very fast. 

It wasn’t easy being the only black girl of many events that she was involved in, or the only black girl in almost all her classes.

“I had to deal with a lot of confrontational racism. It wasn’t the subtle type now or the microaggressions. It was in your face ‘we hate you’ or I was spat on or I was chased or I was cornered and beaten. These were my torturous first three years in Canada.”

They moved from that area to live in an Anglophone settlement where things were a little different from the ordeal she encountered in her old neighbourhood.

“I had also had parents who taught me how to embrace who I was and that I was black, I was beautiful. I was hearing these messages also through the lines of TV where I was watching as a child the civil rights movement.”

Fluent in Spanish, French and English, from 1997 to 1999 she taught Spanish to first, second and third form students at Titchfield High School in Port Antonio, Jamaica while father worked at the agricultural school.

She also established a part-time language school for people who wanted to further their Spanish skills.

Clarke returned to Canada in 1999 to accept a job as an instructor in early childhood education at Sheridan College in Brampton where she worked for ten years.

On November 9, 2015, she was elected as president of the Ontario Black History Society where she served her two-year term.

“I am the best candidate for where people need to be in taking people to the next level, in terms of really understanding what they need and being able to plug in resources to give them what they want,” says Clarke.

Her tagline is “Diversity is delicious” which she explains means: “Everyone under the rainbow – whatever race, whatever ability they have – should be treated with respect and they should have a voice that speaks for them and I believe that I am that voice.”

Veteran Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for Mississauga-Brampton South, Amrit Mangat, was nominated as the Liberal candidate for Mississauga- Malton and the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party candidate is Deepak Anand.

Clarke is among a cadre of black women entering representational politics for the first time. Felicia Samuel is an NDP candidate for Scarborough-Rouge Park, Dionne Duncan is the Ontario PC candidate for Hamilton Centre, and Leisa Washington is the Ontario Liberal Party candidate for Whitby. Clarke and Washington are Jamaicans.

[This story was published in the North American Weekly Gleaner.]