The Heiltsuk Nation released an expert report on Friday on Indigenous Consumer Racial Profiling as part of filings for a British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal complaint against Canadian Tire that will be heard in Vancouver in late October this year.

In October last year, Richard and Dawn Wilson, father and daughter, publicly announced they had filed a BC Human Rights Commission complaint against Canadian Tire Corporation and Blackbird Security Inc., for incidents of alleged racial profiling and racism they experienced at a store in Coquitlam while shopping in January 2020.

Authored by two of Canada's leading human rights experts, Dr Lorne Foster of York University and Dr Les Jacobs of Ontario Tech University, the new report - Indigenous Consumer Racial Profiling in Canada: A Neglected Human Rights Issue - identifies individual and collective harms of Indigenous Consumer Racial Profiling in Canada, and makes recommendations for Indigenous-specific remedies such as healing ceremonies, cultural safety training, and systemic data collection reforms, as well as noting the urgent need for further human rights-based study in the area.

"Consumer racial profiling against Indigenous peoples in Canada is a critically important human rights issue that exacerbates intergenerational trauma and undermines reconciliation efforts," Drs Foster and Jacobs wrote.

"Corporations like Canadian Tire must advance anti-racist practices in commercial settings and participate in Indigenous-specific remedies such as healing ceremonies when racist incidents do occur, if they are to meet their obligations under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples."

Chief of the Heiltsuk Nation, Marilyn Slett, thanked Dr Foster and Dr Jacobs "for identifying the harms of consumer racial profiling that Indigenous people experience every day, but rarely report".

"As a Nation that strongly defends the individual and collective human rights of our members, we will hold Canadian Tire and Blackbird Security to account," she said.

"Ultimately, we hope they will participate in a healing ceremony with our Nation as a form of positive and culturally appropriate restorative justice so that we can turn things around and make them right again."

In 2020, Bank of Montreal (BMO) executives took part in a Heiltsuk healing ceremony, known as a washing ceremony, in the Big House in Bella Bella, following an incident that made headlines when Heiltsuk members Maxwell Johnson and his granddaughter were arrested and detained by Vancouver Police Department constables after a bank employee doubted the validity of their status cards and called 911.

After the washing ceremony, Mr Johnson, a renowned Heiltsuk artist, gifted a painting to BMO and visited the bank to meet with their staff to talk about his artwork.

The new expert report is available online at www.strongascedar.ca.