It was a capacity crowd at Port Elgin Public Library on Sunday, February 2nd as Black History month begins.
They were there to watch a documentary about a little-known time in Toronto known as the ‘Patty War’. Although it was told with humour, it had an undercurrent of racism when the Jamaican Davidson family owned a restaurant in Kensington Market, the Kensington Patty Palace, and how it came under fire from government bureaucracy for the name of its business and what it sold.
According to the government of the day, 1985, under regulation, restaurants in Toronto that served Jamaican patties could not call their product a “patty”, on the grounds that consumers might confuse them with hamburger patties, whereas the Jamaican patty was a pastry with a variety of fillings, including beef.
The bureaucracy not only wanted the name of the restaurant changed but also the commodity, or the family would face huge fines.
The family stood its ground however and fought the bureaucratic edict saying that it was a slight against the Jamaican culture.
Created by writer and director Chris Strikes and overseen by Lesley Birchard in charge of CBC Docs Production, the documentary illustrated the government sentiment of the 1980s.
The film premiered February 17, 2022, on CBC Gem and YouTube with a mixture of documentary footage and satirical dramatic reenactments performed by actor Orville Cummings. Birchird explained that it was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2022 Directors Guild of Canada awards and won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Short Documentary at the 11th Canadian Screen Awards in 2023.
After the documentary ended, audience members were asked their thoughts on the production. Among the thoughts expressed were, “I’ve never even heard of this before, “it really demonstrated the bureaucracy of the government” to “it would be an amazing teaching tool”.
As people left the screening, they were able to actually sample Jamaican patties filled with a variety of fillings from vegetable to chicken, mild minced beef to spicy for the more adventurous, all courtesy of Coral’s Caribbean of Wiarton.
