Canada still falls behind in representing those from racialized communities in key roles on screen and behind the camera

By Serena Lopez 

Photo Courtesy of Smart Incentives 

In 2018, Samora Smallwood had just given her all in an audition for a role in a crime show. It was an eight-episode series shooting in Bulgaria that had a fully fleshed-out female character she was in love with. She was going to get to play the wife of a man who was on death row falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit while balancing law school with the demands of motherhood. And to top it off, the pay was good. After weeks passed and Smallwood didn’t hear anything back, she assumed she didn’t land the role. It wasn’t until she happened to be in attendance at the Director’s Guild Awards of Canada where she spotted the director of the show she auditioned for, heading towards her from across the room.

 Thoughts about her audition ran through her head, she remembers being worried about whether he was coming to relay the message that she didn’t get the part or that her audition wasn’t as good as she imagined it was. As he walks up to her, she recalls him taking her to the side of the room and immediately her worries went away as he tells her how amazing she did in her audition.

 She was his and the showrunner’s first choice to cast in the role, but the producers decided they didn’t want to go “exotic.”

 Smallwood, who’s half-Newfoundlander, and half Cape-Verdean didn’t think that even as a light-skinned actress she’d be considered “too Black” for a role. It was the first time she says that she understood the power executives had at networks even if the director and showrunner may like the actor.

 Now the Co-chair of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists Toronto’s (ACTRA) Diversity Committee, as well as founder of the acting studio, The Actors Work Studio, Smallwood is not new to getting shut down for roles because of her race. She’s just happy that it was for a role that had more than five lines.

 “As an actor of colour, there are a lot of stereotypical roles especially as you’re building your career,” says Smallwood. “Some of the characters you’ll play won’t even have names. So it can be security guard number one, thug number three, or assistant secretary.”

 The lack of substantial roles is something she hears from ACTRA members of colour so often that actors have come up with a term to avoid roles that are “under five”, which describe roles that have five lines or less. Characters for people of colour, she says, are usually defined by their relationship to the protagonist, who is most times a white person, and how they service them.

Canada promotes the notion of multiculturalism, but proper representations of people of colour on Canadian screens are few and far between in the television and film industry that is dominated by stories centered around white people’s experiences. Portrayals of Black and other racialized characters on screen are rarely ever in leading roles where the story gives them a three-dimensional depiction of their humanity and experiences.

 “[People of colour] have always realized that ‘yeah, you have an Asian person in your show, you might have a Brown girl, and you might have somebody Black, but what do they all do for a living?” says Smallwood.

 “The Latinx person in your show is cleaning that white person’s house, the Asian person is that person’s assistant, the Black lady is the mean bus driver on the show and they don’t have their own storyline. They don’t have any autonomy or agency.”

 The recent success of Anne with an E, LetterKenny, Emmy-winning show Schitt’s Creek are a few examples of shows that have had huge commercial success in Canada but that all have one thing in common— the casts are predominantly white.

 Shows like Mohawk Girls and the notable Kim’s Convenience are only part of a handful of shows featuring people of colour in lead roles and are singular experiences of what it means to be a Mohawk or Asian-Canadian person.

 Census data from 2016 states that 52.5 per cent of Toronto’s population is made of people of colour and according to Catalyst research, 22.3 per cent of Canada’s total population, but this representation is not nearly reflected enough on screen.

 There are no equivalent shows with all Black casts in mainstream Canadian media that rival the many Black dominated shows in the U.S, such as Black-ish, Atlanta, or Insecure, that depict the diversity of the Black-Canadian population. It was only in 2019 that actress Vinessa Antoine became the first Black female lead on a prime-time drama in Canadian television history.

In a study by Nordicity, racialized people in 2016 made up 16.3 per cent of speaking roles on Canadian television shows overall and 9.5 per cent of Black people had speaking roles on a drama or comedy show.

In the U.S, not much is different. According to a study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, only 17 of the 100 top films of 2014 featured a lead or co-lead actor from a racialized community with five per cent of those films had Black directors.

The barrier in getting stories about Black Canadians told on screen is a battle Hubert Davis, an Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker, is all too familiar with.

 When Davis recently pitched an idea for a documentary film about the experience of Black kids from the inner city to a Canadian broadcast network, he says they refused to greenlight the project because it “wouldn’t be well-received by audiences.”

 “The main problem is people who are decision makers who can greenlight [projects] literally don’t understand systemic racism or how it works, and their view on the world is within certain margins,” says Davis.

 “They just don’t understand the stories you’re trying to tell, or what you’re trying to represent.”

 Davis says for Black representation to exist in Canadian media, there needs to be action taken to address the systemic racism within the industry that prevents Black filmmakers and creatives from succeeding.

 “Start to change [the representation] on every job, every shoot, and get people within the system who are trained up that look like us to be more represented,” 

 At Telefilm Canada, currently 21 per cent of racialized people and no Indigenous people are employed in executive roles, signaling a lack of BIPOC people in decision-making positions at production companies.

 “It’s about how that shift also makes the industry better. If you give more people a chance to be part of the dialogue, [content] becomes better,” says Davis.

 The pushback in piloting Black stories on Canadian screens is an issue that has long permeated the industry and is what Frances- Anne Solomon, director, producer, and founder of CaribbeanTales, has experienced since she first began her career 35 years ago.

 With two feature films under her belt and a successful 15 year career as a producer at the BBC in London, England, she moved to Canada in 2002 hoping to find opportunities for success in what she thought would be a more open and liberal market than England to create Black content, but was “sorely disappointed.”

 “It was pretty much impossible to do. Because the television industry is incredibly conservative and there is a kind of perversion to anything that’s challenging or different, especially any kind of diversity,” she explained.

“There was just no interest whatsoever at a mainstream level and then as a woman of colour in the industry, I think people just thought I was lying about my background [in film].”

Solomon says there is “a combination of sexism and racism that’s baked into people’s attitudes even today”. Just a month ago, she was pitching a film project centering Black characters for funding to a commissioning editor in Toronto and was told that she didn’t have enough experience as a producer to greenlight the project.

 “Even in the middle of this moment in a time when doors are presumably opening, people still have the gall to say that people of colour don’t have enough experience,” says Solomon.

 “[The industry] always finds these ways of excluding us and cutting us out. We’re just talking about re-addressing a balance [in television and film]. Why does that mean it sacrifices quality…just because there’s a Black person in it?”

 Though many organizations like Bell Media, the Actors Fund of Canada, and the Canadian Arts Council have pledged efforts to “increasing diversity” and supporting Black creatives in the industry, much of the criteria to qualify for funding of projects still leaves out many Black creatives.

 Isioro Tokunbo Jaboro “TJ”, a filmmaker and founder of the Black Actors and Film Guild Canada, says the difficult process in getting grants is part of what is holding back Black creatives from building their start in the industry.

 “They need to understand that you cannot look at everybody as being under one umbrella,” says Jaboro,

 “Black people have their own challenges. There should be different rules in place for the Black community to help them to go from one stage to another stage.”

 This past summer, more than 50 Black Canadian producers addressed a letter to Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault in order to demand more targeted funding investments in Black projects by Canadian media outlets. This is in hopes of tackling the systemic barriers that Black producers and creatives face that hinder them from progressing in the television and film industry.

 After the success of movies like Black Panther and Get Out, Smallwood believes it is a positive sign that audiences are open to spending money to see characters on screen that don’t look like them and should be motivating more networks to invest in quality programming from communities of colour.

She says the fact that the majority of Canada is “very white” but yet shows like CBC Gem’s Tall Boys, Trickster, and Next Stop are being produced, signifies that stories centering BIPOC characters can translate to audiences here.

 “It’s like what [Black people] did when we grew up. We all had to watch show after show, movie after movie, where everyone on the show was white,” she adds.

 “So now we’re asking white audiences to do what we’ve all been doing for years; invest in a hero, invest in a lead, invest in a character that doesn’t look like you.”

Putting stories centering BIPOC experiences on screen goes beyond representation in the mainstream. To be truly representative of the experiences of racialized people in Canada it has to be told by BIPOC creatives themselves.