Category: Community

By early April, just a few weeks after COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, the headlines started appearing: Black people were experiencing an increased risk of infection, hospitalization, and death from the virus. 

The stats were coming from the US and the UK, because we weren’t collecting race-based COVID data in Canada — despite awareness of the risks for Black communities, community members sounding the alarm, and supporting evidence by way of overlapping COVID and census data. 

As Black Lives Matter protests erupted globally at the end of May in response to the killing of George Floyd, accelerating calls from Black community health leaders in Canada to have anti-Black racism declared a health crisis — mainstream discussions were still asking, “Is Canada racist?” 

Sané Dube has been advocating for greater visibility and action with respect to the connection between race and health. Currently the Policy and Government Relations Lead, with a focus on Black health, at the Alliance for Healthier Communities, she has worked in community development, health promotion, research, and strategic policy development. 

I spoke with Sané about the link between anti-Blackness and the severity of COVID among Black people in Canada, the distinctly Canadian blind spot that serves to halt progress on the issue, and what we could be doing differently to dismantle systemic racism in healthcare. 

This interview has been edited for length. 

Statistics are showing that Black people are more likely to die from COVID — but while the numbers are making the headlines, not everyone is gaining an understanding of why this is happening. Can we start there? 

Health is about a lot more than being able to walk into a doctor’s office or being able to walk into a healthcare facility. Health is really influenced by a range of factors and the environments we live in. Social determinants of health can be understood as the conditions that you live, work, and play in — it’s really a combination of the social and economic factors that impact your health.

Housing, for example, impacts health in very significant ways in terms of stability. We know that people who are unhoused or are experiencing homelessness tend to have worse health outcomes than people who have stability and don’t have to worry about housing. These social determinants of health are really looking at health with a much broader view than just through the ability to see a doctor, nurse or healthcare provider. They’re looking at the everyday things in someone’s life that can either help their health or lead to deterioration of their health.

Early on in the pandemic, when first called upon to collect race-based data with respect to COVID, Dr. David Williams, Chief Medical Officer of Health for Ontario, responded that statistics based on race aren’t collected in Canada unless certain groups are found to have risk factors — which seems to completely ignore the existence of social determinants of health. 

That moment was really shocking. At the same time that Ontario was saying we won’t collect the data, we were seeing really striking statistics coming out of the United States and also the United Kingdom. We now know that in the US, Black people are five times more likely to be hospitalized and more than twice as likely to face fatal outcomes from COVID, compared to white Americans. 

We know that in Ontario it’s the same story. At the time when Dr.Williams made this comment, we were already seeing the impact of COVID on some communities. It was really disappointing to hear.

There was a lot of rallying, there was a lot of mobilization — I think people were pushing back against this thing that often happens in Canada, where we try and make invisible the way that systemic racism and structural inequality impact the most marginalized and vulnerable in our communities. We often get, ‘We’re not the same as the US,’ which invisibilizes the harm that Black, racialized and Indigenous people experience in this country. 

The efforts made by advocacy groups eventually led to the Ontario government changing course on the collection of race-based data for COVID, which is certainly a win. But to put that in perspective — this can’t be the first time this conversation was happening, right? 

You’re right. This is not new. People have been calling for this for literally decades. I was looking at something today — someone showed me a committee that had been put together in 1998, asking for the collection of this data. I think that this happened to be a window of opportunity because of the devastation that we have seen with COVID.

Data is collected in Ontario for other sectors. Education collects data by race. Justice also does. And there was a discussion, around 2017, to collect the data for health, but at the time the ministry said that there are lots of privacy concerns. I don’t think in calling for more data collection now, people are saying we should not be mindful of privacy. It’s also important to say that the collection of the data is not the end goal — but having the data means we have better tools to dismantle what causes harm.

I first met Candies Kotchapaw at the Top 25 Women of Influence celebration on March 3, where we presented her with an award for the work she’s been doing as the founder of Developing Young Leaders for Tomorrow, Today (DYLOTT), a leadership incubator focused on Black youth.

The inspiration for DYLOTT came from Candies’ own experience with systemic racism in academia — she holds Master and Bachelor degrees in Social Work, and a diploma in Child and Youth Work — and an understanding of the need to make spaces of influence more accessible for Black communities, from education to corporations to the public sector. She’s now at home with her 7-year-old and 17-month-old, figuring out how to pivot DYLOTT to best serve Black communities in need, and how to raise the funds needed to do it. 

Much like with Indigenous communities, a conversation about the impact of COVID on Black communities extends much further than health. While Candies sees an opportunity for positive change, it’s clearly a challenging road ahead. 

 The interview has been edited for length. 

Let me start by asking, how are you doing?

I was having a conversation with another BIWOC person today, about how Black community members are sharing their experiences, and people are in shock that this actually happens in Canada. And I said to her, I don’t think I’ve ever been as triggered as much as I am triggered now. And it’s because of the spotlight — all of the sudden, all these things are being put out in the open, and discussions are raw, and conversations are really hitting the core of what we’ve been experiencing for such a long time. So how I’m doing is, I’m not sure. 

There are times that I have media trauma. With social media and mainstream media, everything comes home with you. It’s in your living room, it’s in your bedroom, it’s in your kitchen — wherever we have a screen, it’s there with you. And Black community members have been put on the stage, and now we are expected to perform, in a way that we’ve never been conditioned to perform, nor have we been given the opportunity to prepare. I’ve never been invited to speak this much in all the years that I’ve been active in program development. The best term that I can use is just truly overwhelmed by it all.    

And through all of this, you’re figuring out how to keep DYLOTT moving forward. How has that journey been?

Before COVID-19 hit, we had just come off our closing activities for 2019. After having experienced a tremendous amount of success for our pilot year in different programs, we were ready to bring them to other Black communities across Ontario and then nationally. Over October, November, and December we were building our strategic direction — operationally, financially, and in terms of the personnel that we’re going to bring on board — and had started conversations about going after an Ontario Trillium Foundation Grow Grant. That would have been multi-year funding, so we wouldn’t have to be in the precarious position of looking for funding every single year.

In January, we started to write the grant and were communicating with potential partners to come on board and support the program. By February, COVID started to take root and our steering committee and our board members began to talk about what we should do. By March, everything was shut down. Fortunately, we were already doing virtual conferencing — everybody who is in DYLOTT works full-time, or has part-time work or school work — so we were doing conference calls at 9:30 at night when our children went to bed. 

And what about that strategic growth plan? Are you continuing in the direction you were discussing, or has COVID changed things? 

The work really has shifted from ‘How do we prepare to roll out our current programs?’ to ‘Is there an opportunity to prepare Black youth for the transition into the future of the work?’ Because we know that the digital age is already here and our communities are already left behind.

When COVID hit and we had to adjust to learning at home, there were pockets of information coming out saying that Black communities don’t have access to reliable Internet, we don’t have access to reliable technology. We already knew those things were happening — but it was an opportunity for us to say we need to create access to those technologies that are going to be mandatory in the digital age, during the recovery period and beyond. 

That’s a mountain of a job, because how do we reach out to these people using the virtual space when they don’t have the access to the virtual space? That’s a road-map that we need to create to make sure that we don’t leave anybody behind, but we recognize that is going to be slow, it’s going to be long, and I’m sure it’s going to be treacherous. 

Looking at the issue of learning from home, the Ontario government made big announcements about distributing laptops and tablets to disadvantaged students — but it’s community organizations like DYLOTT that are recognizing the gaps in the program. Should the government be working with you more closely on efforts like distributing learning devices? 

I absolutely think we should take the lead here, because we know those communities that we’re working with, and have an understanding of the needs of the people who participate in our programs. We can provide training, and help families to adjust to the new demands and technological requirements that they’re being presented with. The assumption is that we just provide them with the technology and they will figure it out. That’s not always the case.

I can draw on the example of my seven-year-old daughter. She had a Google Meet meeting every Wednesday with her teacher and her classmates for an hour. The only thing I got from her teacher and from the TDSB [Toronto District School Board] is: ‘Here is the link to the Google Meet, and the time. Log on when it’s time.’ I could figure it out, but what about those families who are technologically illiterate? What about those families that have children with a learning disability, with autism, with all the other challenges that come, the exceptionalities that children have? What do you do to support those families? 

I think the assumption is that people will just get by and figure it out, but you can’t have those assumptions when you’re dealing with a population of people that have already been marginalized within society. COVID really has rolled back the curtain on all the inequities that exist.

Within the first few minutes of the conversation, one thing is clear: it is impossible to understand the impact of COVID-19 on Indigenous people living in Canada without knowledge of the centuries of struggle that came before it, and the racism, oppression, and genocide that they were experiencing already.  

On these topics, Dr. Pamela Palmater is an authority — a result of more than 25 years of focus on First Nations issues, studying, volunteering, advocating, and working as a lawyer, Associate Professor, and the Chair in Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University. A Mi’kmaw citizen and member of the Eel River Bar First Nation in northern New Brunswick, Pam has spoken internationally on Indigenous issues and authored three books on the subject; her latest, Warrior Life: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence, just became available for preorder. 

I spoke with Pam on June 3, the one-year anniversary of the release of the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. On the same day, Pam published an article that shows through statistics that Canada has a racism problem, and Chantel Moore, a 26-year-old from Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, was fatally shot by a police officer during a wellness check. 

And so our conversation started not on COVID, but on injustice.  

The interview has been edited for length

Do you think the pandemic has been shining a bigger spotlight on the issues that Indigenous people in Canada face, or has it been a distraction? 

To me, COVID-19 has been used sadly as an excuse to deflect from the multiple crisis Canada was in prior to the pandemic. For months, we were in Wet’suwet’en Strong protests, that were anti-police violence, anti-police racism, anti-state oppression and breach of Indigenous rights — but even prior to that, Canada was already in the worst human rights crisis that it has ever faced. 

The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls found as a matter of fact and law — not theory or academic research, but fact and law — that Canada is guilty of historic and ongoing genocide, that Canada’s laws, policies, practices, actions and omissions are a direct cause of the crisis level rates of exploitation, disappearance and murders of Indigenous women and girls, and that Canada demonstrates it has a manifest pattern of intention to destroy Indigenous people — and that hasn’t changed, despite using different policy names. Everything is still about accessing our lands and resources and essentially assimilating Indigenous people, and they ignore all of the violence and premature death and ill health and poverty conditions as part of that. 

And so we should all be very concerned about COVID, but every pandemic in history has always disproportionately impacted Indigenous people, and in particular, Indigenous women. Indigenous people were overrepresented in H1N1, in terms of hospitalizations, intensive care, and death, and pregnant Indigenous women were also overrepresented in hospitalizations during that time.

Considering H1N1 disproportionately impacted indigenous communities in Canada, is anyone looking at those stats right now with respect to COVID?

Indian Affairs, which is so-called Indigenous Services Canada,[1] has been very criticized for not collecting enough data. They were reporting exceptionally low numbers, and so First Nations, knowing that this data was wrong and presenting the worst picture possible reported their own data to Ryerson University’s Yellowhead Institute — not all First Nations in Canada, but they got a large group to submit their numbers — and the numbers were almost three times higher than what Indian Affairs was reporting.

And that doesn’t even include all of the First Nations. If you don’t know where COVID is, who is infected, how can you contact trace that? How can you prevent it? First Nations for the last few months have been complaining that they haven’t been sent tests. There’s been no concerted, purposeful, intentional focus on the most at-risk, health-compromised population in this country, which is First Nations people. 

Knowing that, do you think there has been an appropriate response?

The COVID pandemic should have resulted in a doubling of the effort to make sure that Indigenous women and girls are taken care of. That simply hasn’t been the case. There have been outbreaks in prisons, and Indigenous women are the fastest-growing population and already overrepresented in prisons — they represent 42 percent in federal corrections alone. Indigenous girls represent as high as 98 percent of the youth corrections population. 

So if you think about institutions and how they’re natural fermentors of the pandemic because of the overcrowding, lack of hygiene, lack of access to health care, then we know that Indigenous women and girls are at the highest risk because they are overrepresented in all these institutions. It’s just beyond belief that Canada didn’t immediately act on Indigenous women and girls with the report, but didn’t also immediately have a gendered pandemic plan for Indigenous women and girls, to target them first and foremost for protection. 

What gives you hope in all this?

I think the hope that I see is the ways in which specifically First Nations and Indigenous women have addressed murdered and missing women and girls, land-based protests and land-based defense, and even this pandemic — by asserting their own sovereignty. And we may be doing so in an underfunded capacity, in a marginalized, oppressed capacity, in a context of ongoing genocide and pandemic risk — but we continue to show our strength, and our resilience, and our leadership, and our commitment to our sovereignty as nations, to continue to do this for our people. 

There are literally a thousand stories of Indigenous women and girls serving their communities. They’re the most underserved, but they’re out there volunteering for elders, they’re cleaning, they’re bringing supplies, they’re advocating. They’re literally on the front line. And there are still women out there on the front lines of land defense and that’s where I find my hope. In the assertion and defense of our sovereignty and our territory, despite the overwhelming and monumental barriers, and the risk to our lives.

It’s really important that we get these stories out, and show Canadians that this is where hope is, supporting Native people in asserting and defending their sovereignty and territory, and the right to make decisions for themselves, that’s what will get us out of this. Canadians are starting to see that the things that we were advocating for and protesting against were the very same things that were going to benefit Canadians. So when we’re trying to defend clean water for First Nations, that’s actually a benefit to all Canadians, because we’re not going to live very long without clean water or farmable land. And similarly, when we’re defending human rights and civil liberties, that’s for everybody. And it’s a very slippery slope to say it’s okay to breach those rights for Native people, now it’s okay to breach those rights for Black people, now it’s okay to breach those rights for immigrants, now it’s okay to breach those rights for poor people — it never ends, and so we have to have an absolute stop against the breach of human rights, and that benefits all Canadians.

And what can all Canadians be doing to be better allies?

You don’t have to be working in a social justice advocacy organization to advocate loudly and strenuously and continuously. If you look at the Wet’suwet’en Strong solidarity action, again for most of the large marches and protests and rallies, the majority of them were Canadians, and again politicians took notice of that. So every letter, protest, large behind-the-scenes influence or donation — all of that makes a difference. But the thing is, it has to be vocal. It has to be aggressive. And when I say aggressive, I don’t mean violent — but it has to be pushy, and it has to be continuous, because that’s the only way it’s going to work.

[1]The Harper government replaced the minister of Indian Affairs with a minister of Aboriginal Affairs in 2011; the Trudeau government changed it to minister of Indigenous affairs in 2015, and then split the department in two — to Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, and Indigenous Services—in 2017. It wasn’t until July 15, 2019, however, thatthe Department of Indian Affairs Canada was legally replaced. Many Indigenous activists, including Pam,saw the change as “more superficiality than substance.”