Racism called common in Montreal hospitals
Dying woman filmed derogatory comments
MONTREAL — The executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal says racism against Indigenous people is so common at local hospitals that her organization escorts clients to medical visits.
“Every time we have to bring someone to a hospital, we escort them, because we know that there will be racist comments toward them,” Nakuset, who uses only one name, said in an interview Wednesday. “We have a form because we anticipate what’s going to happen.”
That form, she said, has a checkbox for racist comments because she said they’re so common.
On Monday, Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw woman, filmed nurses making derogatory comments to her as she lay dying in a hospital bed in Joliette, Que., northeast of Montreal.
Nakuset said the video reveals the nurses thought they could get away with talking like that.
“If Joyce didn’t have a camera, this wouldn’t be a story.”
Dr. Alika Lafontaine, an anesthesiologist in Grande Prairie, Alta., who is of Cree and Anishinaabe heritage, said Indigenous people regularly experience discrimination in Canada’s health-care systems.
“Patients experience this every single day, to varying degrees,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
The Quebec government has promised two investigations into Echaquan’s death, one by the coroner, the other by the regional health centre. And while Lafontaine said those investigations are important, they won’t solve larger systemic problems because these kinds of racist incidents often don’t get reported, he said.
“If we’re really going to fix the system, we have to not just unpack the racial events that happened, but also the reasons why this person would think that it was OK to act this way,” he said. These experiences leave people feeling disempowered in medical environments and reduce trust, Lafontaine said.