COVID-19 IS UNMASKING RACE-BASED INEQUITIES

Situation should serve as wake-up call for Canadians, Cesar Cala says

COVID -19 is hitting people of colour more severely in Canada. If we tracked race or ethnicity as relevant data along with age, gender and underlying medical conditions, it would reveal a telling story.

In Alberta, meat packing plants are staffed by a racialized workforce — Filipinos, Vietnamese, Mexican, Eritrean, Ethiopian and other backgrounds. Outbreaks in three of these plants account for about 2,400 known COVID -19 cases, a third of the province’s total cases. Add the number of people infected in other workplaces and you begin to see the full picture where people of colour disproportionally are infected by the virus.

Since the virus does not discriminate by race, the issue must lie in socio-economic conditions placing certain people in harmful situations at work. From a public health perspective, race is an important underlying condition.

I was part of a group asked by Alberta Health Services to provide support to Cargill workers and their families. We realized quickly it meant much more than just health and basic necessities, such as food. The crisis had magnified inequities already simmering under the surface.

This is what we heard from the workers:

1. Their voices were never taken seriously. Their warnings about the early signs of the outbreak were dismissed.

2. The workers felt forced to make a choice between economics and health. The meat plant was the gateway to Canada and to a better life. Temporary foreign workers (TFWS), here on single-employer visas, are consumed with worry about their continued stay in Canada.

3. They felt they were being blamed for the outbreak and received no acknowledgment as essential workers providing Canadians an uninterrupted food supply.

Public officials early in the outbreak seemed to link the spread primarily to the workers’ necessary practice of carpooling and shared housing, not on the actual working conditions in the plant. This is akin to blaming doctors and nurses for getting infected for deciding to continue treating patients. Without an understanding of people’s everyday realities, even our venerated health institutions can naively fall into this trap of victim-blaming. When the plant finally closed after the death of a worker, the blaming followed the workers and their families into their neighbourhoods.

Meanwhile, discrimination, especially against Asian-canadians, increased across Canada. The most visible are threats, slurs, assaults from those who are openly racist. We get riled up by such incidents, as we should. As a society, with our public institutions and leaders, we should recognize and confront these incidents and stop their proliferation because history has shown it can get worse.

Premier Jason Kenney called these incidents un-albertan. Terms such as un-albertan, un-canadian or un-american are problematic. We should define it accurately as racism. Leaders should describe Cargill’s actions as un-albertan for endangering the health of many Albertans.

Racism becomes more visible in a crisis, such as the pandemic. This puts people of colour and their families constantly in harm’s way — where they work, where they study, where they live and where they seek help.

Cargill showed us some of these conditions in really stark ways. Policies governing immigration, occupational health and safety, labour and industry came together and created a perfect storm of vulnerability for many workers. The pandemic unmasked racial inequities that propped up the old normal. Building a new and better normal includes taking definite steps to change.

At the minimum, we must do away with single-employer visas for TFWS and provide immediate permanent residency in Canada; ensure fair wages and safe working conditions for essential workers; provide opportunities for workers to participate in decisions that impact them; strengthen anti-racism legislation and implementation of meaningful actions.

As a community, we have a choice to make. Are we to take this experience as a recurring nightmare? Or will we recognize it as a major wake-up call?

The workers felt forced to make a choice between economics and health.