‘Systemic racism’ in Canada reflected in health, income and other indicators
Term re-enters public discourse with inequality back in global spotlight
MONTREAL—For Louise Delisle, an African Nova Scotian who grew up in the rural town of Shelburne, the racism her community has experienced over the years is reflected in the health of its members.
Her father and brother died of cancer. Her mother is still alive after two bouts of breast cancer, and her sister and niece are also cancer survivors. The 69-yearold Delisle lays the blame for her community’s health problems on a now-closed toxic dump that existed for decades near the historical Black part of town.
“There is a lot of cancer in just about every family,” she said in a recent interview.
Ingrid Waldron, a professor in Dalhousie University’s school of nursing, says the health conditions in Shelburne and another rural African Nova Scotia community, Lincolnville, are examples of systemic racism in Canada.
Systemic racism, Waldron said, refers to the exclusion or underrepresentation of people of colour and Indigenous people in society through the policies and decisions of those in power. These policies and decisions lead to inequalities and disparities between races on such measures as income, education and health.
The term has re-entered mainstream public debate across Canada following the killing of George Floyd, who died in police custody in May.
Waldron said in a recent interview that systemic racism is the way “disadvantage, discrimination and exclusion” are embedded in social systems.
It is reflected when people of colour and Indigenous people are under-represented in the judiciary and overrepresented in prisons. Or when people of colour earn less than others and provincial civil services are disproportionately white.
Indigenous adults make up three per cent of Canada’s population and visible minorities more than 22 per cent. But in Canada’s federal and provincial judiciaries, 1.3 per cent of judges are Indigenous and four per cent are visible minorities.
About 21 per cent of visible minorities in Canada are considered low-income, compared with just over 12 per cent of people who are not visible minorities. Nationally, the median total income for Black people is 34 per cent lower than the income for non-visible minorities.
In 2016, Indigenous women accounted for roughly 31 of the federal prison population, and men about 23 per cent.
Waldron says systemic racism explains why Nova Scotia’s Black rural communities are rarely mentioned when political leaders talk about environmental issues.
Her 2018 book, “There’s Something In The Water,” examined the legacies of industrial pollution on towns such as Shelburne and Lincolnville. She argues that landfills, trash incinerators, coal plants, toxic waste facilities and other environmentally hazardous activities tend to be near communities of colour, Indigenous territories and the working poor.
Delisle said growing up, no one in her community wanted to say anything about the dump fires that blew noxious gases and ash through her part of town. The dump was placed in her community, she said, “because no one said anything about it.” It was fully shut down in 2016.
“People didn’t want to do anything that was going to make them stand out or seem like a troublemaker in the community,” she said.