Thank you for the question.
Before I was suspended, I was working in public health and also appreciating the structural determinants of health, including the impacts of colonialism here, from Turtle Island to Palestine. When I think about the role that medicine as an institution has played, historically and ongoing, in things like justifying slavery, forced sterilization of indigenous women and nutritional experimentation on indigenous children, these are the realities we face in building trust with our patients who are the most vulnerable and the most structurally oppressed. When that is the work of trying to move anti-racism and health equity forward in this oppressive colonial structure of medicine within Canada, it becomes really challenging to do that work when we're faced with investigations and discipline as health care workers and as physicians working in this space.
On top of that, the suspension I experienced also had chilling effects on my colleagues and other learners and faculty within the institution but also across Canada. I know of a plastic surgeon who served with Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, in Gaza in December of last year, who returned to Ottawa to work. She wanted to speak about what she had seen in Gaza, but because she saw my suspension and the impacts of it on me and others—the silencing, the chilling effect of anti-Palestinian racism—she ended up not doing a grand rounds presentation with other colleagues.
This is the reality of freedom of expression for physicians who are simply wanting to call for an end to the genocide that is being supported by this country. We need to be able to criticize the actions of our country and criticize the actions of other countries in their genocidal colonial violence as it continues to this day.