Black lives matter in Canada too!
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EDITORIAL/ÉDITORIAL
Black lives matter in Canada too! « Black lives matter » : c’est vrai aussi au Canada! Louise Potvin 1 Published online: 14 September 2020 # The Canadian Public Health Association 2020
As pen is set to paper, a summer which on many levels will be recognized as unlike any in our collective memory is drawing to a close. It will certainly have been the summer of COVID-19, this pandemic of a virus that was completely unknown until a few months ago. The virus has spared no country and has revealed shortfalls in healthcare systems. It illuminated the catastrophic deficiencies of Western democracies that allowed notorious incompetents to govern according to their whims, in total ignorance of scientific knowledge and of the manner in which it is produced. It has certainly also been one of repeated heat waves. In North America as in Europe, evidence of climate change has manifested on a daily basis, with records broken for heat on the North American East Coast and for drought on the West Coast (NOAA 2020). It will also be remembered that for the first time in American history and following a spring and summer punctuated by demonstrations to affirm “Black Lives Matter”, a Black woman has joined the ticket for one of the two major parties for the presidential election. However, it will have been forgotten that Statistics Canada published a report on the evolution of the socio-economic status of Canada’s Black population since the start of the century (Houle 2020). Yet this report is of utmost importance since it shines a light on a significantly overshadowed sector of Canadian society. In fact, over the course of the spring and summer, while American cities were burning, Canadian institutions and leaders, taking steps in the solidarity movement represented by peaceful demonstrations in Canada’s largest cities, had to admit to the existence of systemic racism in the country. The notable exception was Québec, where Premier François Legault, while recognizing that inequalities exist between Black individuals and the
* Louise Potvin [email protected] 1
Centre de recherche en santé publique, Université de Montréal et CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada
general population, refused to attribute them to institutional discriminatory practices (Buzetti and Crête 2020). From a public health point of view, the approach that consists of recognizing, flushing out and eradicating systemic racism where it exists saves lives. In a recent article, Williams et al. (2019) analyze the literature and show how institutional racism, that which is registered and reproduced in the formal and informal practices of our institutions, affects the health of those who are its victims. For them, the lack of access to education and to quality jobs are two fundamental factors by which institutional racism affects health. For Black American minorities, institutional racism is associated from birth with an elevated risk of prematurity and of low birthweight. With regard to cancer, a systematic review re
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