Opinion
There Is No Exploitation Without Exploitation
When the system shapes survival choices for Black boys
A 2026, The Fifth Estate, investigative documentary by CBC titled “Missing Black Boys,” exposes a dirty little secret in Ontario. The story opens in the middle of a crisis. Teenage Black boys from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) are disappearing. They are being used as drug mules who later resurface in Thunder Bay, Northern Ontario, on First Nation reserves. The culprit? Toronto street gangs! Go figure. Someone in the report pauses to ask what sounds reasonable: “Is it a draw? Is it coercion? Is it exploitation?”
The truth is, those questions quietly shift responsibility downward. Those questions are not neutral. They are telling.
The investigation posits that this is not a series of random runaways, but rather a coordinated criminal strategy that leaves families desperate and searching for their children in often hostile environments.
The investigation highlights that despite Black boys making up less than 10% of Toronto’s youth population, they represent nearly half of the reported missing male youth in 2024.
When people ask whether exploitation exists, instead of who created the conditions that made exploitation possible, they bend the narrative. That frame moves away from system accountability and toward individual responsibility. Accountability fades out. Responsibility floats in.
That is the lie they want us to believe. This is amoral. In my mind, there is no exploitation without exploitation.
Exploitation did not start with today’s gang leaders. It began with colonizing forces operating under the banner of imperialism. It was engineered, normalized, reproduced and transferred as extraction, control, and violence for profit. Over time, those methods slipped down from institutions, passed down the social ladder and onto the streets. The result is a split reality where exploitation and trafficking continue. Today, only the lowest-level players are criminalized and punished as thugs, while those in suits are praised and rewarded as leaders.
Exploitation did not originate in the streets. It was formalized under imperialism, built into systems, and handed down.
It grows like dandelions on concrete pavement and creeps onto our front lawns where the most vulnerable are stripped of stability, income, housing, and protection. When marginalized conditions exist, exploitation follows as a predictable outcome. The presence of exploitation tells you something upstream has already failed. Because where negligence exists, criminality persists.
Exploitation is pervasive. It is entrenched in our society.
Thus, when institutions ask whether Black boys were drawn in, coerced, or exploited, the questions themselves miss the point. The answer to each of those options sits inside structural oppression: Scarcity exploits. Neglect exploits. Policy failure exploits. Informal economies exploit what the system has already weakened.
That is why blaming individuals, including quasi-criminals who lure others, interrupts the analysis. It dehumanizes the ones most affected by the system—bad players operating inside an already exploitative environment. This is not to dismiss the harm — harm matters. But so does accountability.
Consequently, we must begin the investigation with systemic and structural exploitation before we look at street-gangs, not after. Failing which, it must circle back to it.
Only from that lens can we see the full scope of the problem. Only from that lens, we can see that government and leadership means owning the conditions that made exploitation possible.
Employment insecurity leads to financial insecurity. Financial insecurity leads to housing instability. Housing instability produces vulnerability. Vulnerability invites exploitation. Crime follows exploitation. That is the order, and that order matters.
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Studies show that Black families are the first to feel the squeeze in an economic collapse. This is well documented in Canada and across the globe. When job cuts are announced, Black workers are often laid off first and rehired last. When housing is scarce, Black families face greater risks of homelessness. When public services shrink, Black communities are the first to lose resources and last to recover. Black boys sit at the periphery of this squeeze — squeezed out of society, physically and financially.
This is not a cultural failure. It is a structural sorting.
A boy whose family lacks income security, housing stability, mentorship, and protection is inevitably “drawn” to risk. He is pushed toward it through a designed pipeline. So, it is called responding to scarcity. When legitimate paths close, illegitimate ones open. That is adaptation, not deviance.
Criminology has tracked and reported that for decades. During economic hardship, the first crimes to rise are gang-related activities: drug trafficking, theft, assault and prostitution. These increases follow high unemployment and housing instability; they do not precede them. Crime is a symptom of policy failure.
Now, when two Black youths are charged with murder, the system points to individual failure and covers collective causation. The same institutions that ignored Black families are now sidelining missing Black boys and speaking about discipline and punishment. That contrast screams loudly.
Many will say the men who lure the youths are to blame. Which is fair. However, it ignores a blatant truth. Those lurers are also operating inside the same scarcity. Exploitation does not only move downward. It permeates laterally among people trapped in the same broken system. That does not erase harm, but it helps to explain it and distributes accountability.
Real leadership begins where excuses end.
Owning this endemic means naming the system’s role in creating it. Ontario has an employment crisis that feeds a housing crisis that is effecting mental stability. That cycle pushes young people into unstable environments that become recruiting grounds for gangs and traffickers who offer what the state withholds: financial stability, belonging, and protection. We cannot continue to live within the lies.
Blaming Black boys for seeking “the bag” and belonging is like blaming water for flowing downhill.
The right questions are not being asked. Instead of debating whether the boys are being drawn or coerced, leaders ought to ask how we can protect marginalized communities that have been left economically exposed during every downturn.
The exploitation has already occurred; that’s a given. Rather than prosecuting outcomes, governments must ensure greater inputs: jobs, housing, education, mental health supports, and early intervention.
Crime is not resolved with punishment. It is resolved with ownership, followed by repair.
Until the system accepts its part in this circus of crime, the cycle will keep circulating. Different race. Different communities. Same headlines. Same questions. Same deflection.
There is no exploitation without exploitation. And there is no solution without ownership.
Sources
- Statistics Canada. Labour Market Outcomes by Race. Government of Canada.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2023008/article/00002-eng.htm - Public Safety Canada. Economic Conditions and Crime Trends.
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/fr-crm-tttds/index-en.aspx. - Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson. “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality.” Crime and Inequality, Stanford University Press, 1995.
- The Fifth Estate (CBC). Black Boys Missing in Ontario,
https://www.cbc.ca/fifth.
