Social Justice

Host Asha Tomlinson speaks with activists who have been a part of the Black Lives Matter movement for many years about what has changed and what now needs to happen.

CBC Being Black in Canada website

Academy award-winning actor and singer Billy Porter takes us on a journey through time to explore the more obscure political actions that have changed the course of LGBTQIA+ history. Before that fateful day at Stonewall in 1969, there were nearly 50 years worth of queer political actions that took place but today, they are still overlooked when regarding modern history and civil rights movements.

Marie-Joseph Angélique was an enslaved Black woman owned by Thérèse de Couagne de Francheville in Montréal. In 1734, she was charged with arson after a fire leveled Montréal’s merchants' quarter. It was alleged that Angélique committed the act while attempting to flee her bondage. She was convicted, tortured and hanged. While it remains unknown whether or not she set the fire, Angélique’s story has come to symbolize Black resistance and freedom. (Canadian Encyclopedia)

Filmmaker Cazhhmere is a 7th generation black Canadian. Despite this deep history, she's constantly asked to explain where she from—even though the answer is always "Canada."

Despite the Americans With Disablilites Act passing over 30 years ago, much of New York City's public transit remains inaccessible for individuals with mobility limitations. These first person accounts show why this is everybody's problem, not just the people it directly effects.

• Accessible Canada Act Wikipedia page
• Council of Canadians with Disabilities
• Disability Rights - Canadian Human Rights Commission

A charming short doc about nine-year-old Eve, a young climate activist who lives with her family in an off-grid community in England. The film follows Eve as she plans and nervously anticipates her return to traditional schooling. Her schoolmates recognize Eve from a recorded protest in London, and she soon learns she is a welcomed new student to the school.

Stacey Dooley travels the world to uncover the hidden costs of our addiction to fast fashion. She will see for herself how toxic chemicals released by the garment industry are polluting waterways that millions of people rely on. She’ll witness the former Aral Sea, once one of the largest bodies of fresh water now reduced almost entirely to dust. These are shocking discoveries likely to make you think twice about whether you really need those new clothes.

• Good On You - Brand Directory
• Fashion Revolution website
• Our fast fashion habit is killing the planet - CBC

Girls for Future follows four girls, aged between 11 and 14 years, from Senegal, Indonesia, Australia and India who fight for a better future. All are directly affected by the consequences of environmental destruction: Senegal stands for the global water crisis, Indonesia for plastic waste pollution, India for the agricultural crisis and in Australia we witness the fatal destruction in the oceans and on land through climate change.

Why are we asking a teenager how to solve the climate crisis? “It’s absurd,” says Greta Thunberg, in an Opinion Video guest essay, that we are asking her to answer this question. Even more absurd, she argues, “is the fact that the climate and ecological emergency is being reduced to a problem that needs to be fixed.”

In this Oscar-nominated examination of race in America, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions an unfinished memoir by legendary activist and writer James Baldwin. Bringing to life Baldwin's personal account of the assassinations of fellow revolutionaries and friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., I Am Not Your Negro is at once an on-the-ground view of the Civil Rights Movement and a deeply intimate foray into one man's own inner struggle. All too relevant today, this documentary is an incisive societal critique that also has the power to inspire change. Featuring compelling narration by Samuel L. Jackson who brings Baldwin's spellbinding words to life.

Chronicles Lewis’ 60-plus years of social activism and legislative action on civil rights, voting rights, gun control, health-care reform and immigration.

Justice in Translation follows a woman on a mission to make the Mexican justice system intelligible to all. Many Indigenous people in Mexico don’t speak Spanish—which can put them at a severe disadvantage in courtrooms where no translators are available.

A father sets out on a car ride with his teenage son and reflects on the conversation he knows he will soon have to have: how to conduct himself as a young black man in Canadian society.

On November 8, 1946, Viola Desmond stood up against a racially segregated movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Her courageous stand, nine years before Rosa Parks' action, was a seminal event in Canada's civil rights movement.

An exploration of the life and career of United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and how her legal legacy has propelled the battle for gender equality.

Ever since the 1969 riots on the streets outside New York City’s Stonewall Inn, L.G.B.T.Q. communities have gathered there to express their joy, their anger, their pain and their power.