Editor’s Note: This article draws on investigative reports and community perspectives regarding the exploitation of Black youth in Ontario. For those seeking resources or wanting to join the movement to protect our children, look into community-led initiatives like Find Ontario Missing Boys.
We were deeply honoured to receive the invitation from CBC regarding the community screening of Fifth Estate – Missing Black Boys. at the St. Francis Theatre. While a prior commitment prevents me from joining Brandon Gonez and the esteemed panelists, the mission of the documentary resonates deeply with the work we have been quietly advancing at the Toronto Caribbean Newspaper.
We have been investigating this tangled web (from the GTA to Thunder Bay) long before the cameras arrived, fueled by insights from a respected source who reached out to me with an angle the public didn’t know. After we first wrote about this at the beginning of 2025 (A Community Outraged – We cannot stand by in silence while our children disappear without action | Toronto Caribbean Newspaper), and again on January 16th, 2026 (“I hope they get found and are safe!” What are young people saying about missing boys in Ontario? | Toronto Caribbean Newspaper), I was informed that the authorities knew exactly why these boys were being taken, and the posters we saw were often strategic tools to draw attention to a much larger operation.
Though I could not be there in person, I am compelled to speak on what we have discovered: the hidden psychological scripts, the structural failures, and the solutions that are still not being discussed openly in our town halls.
“You are sitting at your kitchen table, staring at a bedroom door that hasn’t opened in three days. Your son, the one who used to race you across the basketball court, is suddenly a ghost in his own home. He’s 15, maybe 16, and he’s walking around with a second cell phone you didn’t buy. You ask him where it came from, and he gives you that look, the one that says you’re already part of the system he’s trying to outrun…”
I am telling you, he’s being recruited into a corporate structure that views him as a high-risk, low-cost asset.
Let me decode this for you, because the town hall meetings won’t. They will talk about safety and policing, but they won’t talk about the intelligence operation happening under your roof. You think your son is acting out. I am telling you, he’s being recruited into a corporate structure that views him as a high-risk, low-cost asset.
He is looking for a way to be a man in a world that has already decided he’s a liability.
The Manufactured Vacuum
Why your son? Why now? If we look at this through the lens of structural analysis, the answer is calculated, not random. In Ontario, Black boys are suspended from school at disproportionate rates and face a 26% unemployment rate, double that of their non-racialized peers. When a 15-year-old can’t get a job at a fast-food joint but has someone who has grown to trust offer him $500 a day, he isn’t making a criminal choice; to him, he is making a logical economic one.
This is what Noam Chomsky might call manufacturing consent on a street level. The system creates a void: no jobs, no brotherhood in schools, and constant heat from police, and the gangs, sometimes criminal masterminds, move in to fill it. They offer an emotional vacuum filler. The Fifth Estate documentary showed that they don’t start with fentanyl; they start with fake phones to test the young man’s loyalty, teaching him the ladder of the business before he ever leaves the GTA.
The gangs are strategic storytellers. They sell a pipe dream of easy wealth, status, and respect. They tell these young men that they are earning their stripes, but in reality, they are preparing him to be a mule.
The “OT” Reality Check
The glamorous video your son sees on social media, with the stacks of cash and the “Hustler” graffiti, is a psychological operation. The grimy truth is found in a trap house in Thunder Bay or Sarnia, 1,400 kilometers from home.
The gangs are strategic storytellers. They sell a pipe dream of easy wealth, status, and respect.
Imagine this; your son, who you still remember racing across a gym floor, is now sleeping on a soiled mattress pushed against a wall in a house where the parents have overdosed and the children have been taken away. He is being told to stay inside, never use an Uber, and never call home. He is making thousands of dollars an hour for a boss who stays safe in Toronto while your son faces tasers, loaded handguns, and five-shot gunfights.
As Biz Lok, a rapper currently serving ten years, admitted from his cell during the Fifth Estate documentary, “I have bare dead homies patted all over my skin. They have nothing to show for the life that they lived… their moms couldn’t even afford their funerals.” That is the exit strategy the recruiters don’t put in the TikTok videos.
I also want you to note that he said, “Mom’s!” This is a whole other issue that adds to the perpetual cycle. Where are the fathers. In this documentary, they were fortunate enough to find men to come out to speak on behalf of their families, but in many homes in Toronto, this is not the case.
The Infiltrated Brotherhood
The authorities treat this as a missing persons case, but it’s a human trafficking crisis. The police claim that 98% of kids are found, but they don’t tell you about the 11 months a child spends as a servant to a predator before he is found in a jail cell, or a morgue.
The system is three steps behind, because it thinks this is about drugs. It’s not. It’s about psychology and status. The silence your son maintains is the key to survival in a hierarchy where he is at the very bottom. The judge who sentences him will call him a “menace,” but the bosses who used him as a mule are the real cowards.
To win this war, we have to stop acting like social workers and start acting like strategists.
The Counter-Hustle
To win this war, we have to stop acting like social workers and start acting like strategists. We need to out-maneuver the predators. We need to weaponize the heat.
Rebrand the “Hustle
We need to expose the hierarchy. We don’t tell these boys the game is wrong; we tell them they are being played. We show them that the “OT” trip isn’t a hustle; is a servant’s errand for a man who won’t even pay for their funeral. We attack their pride. We show them that being a mule is the opposite of being a boss. This is something that needs to be done by individuals who have lived that life, and lived to tell the tale.
Urban Tech and “Mogul Camps
If the gangs offer a path to $30,000, we must offer a Legal Bag that pays more. Instead of standard youth programs, we need Urban Tech and Trade Incubators. These should be high-stakes environments teaching coding, high-frequency trading, or music production, skills that offer the same status, but with a longer life expectancy.
The only people these boys will listen to are the men who have walked the same path
The Second Chance Economic Shield
The government must incentivize businesses to hire these boys through a Second Chance Employment Credit. If we can make a 15-year-old un-hustle able by giving him a legal job that provides confidence and money, the street loses its leverage.
The only people these boys will listen to are the men who have walked the same path and seen the fork in the road. They provide the moral compass and brotherhood that gangs currently monopolize.
Change the Game
Mother, Father, Educator, your son is being targeted, because he has potential that hasn’t been harvested by the right system yet. The predators see his ambition as a tool for their profit. We must see his ambition as the fuel for our community’s sovereignty.
We have to stop talking and start out-maneuvering. We make our boys high-profile, so they are too much heat for a gang to hide. We teach them that the moment they are told to pack plastic bags, they are being prepared for a coffin.
It’s time to offer our sons a superior hustle, one where they get to keep the bag, their dignity, and their lives.
Parents; watch the signs. Decode the silence and remember: the only way to beat a rigged game is to change the game entirely.
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