Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
My name is Paul Taylor. I'm the executive director of FoodShare Toronto, an organization that works in partnership with communities across the city. We serve as a catalyst advancing meaningful solutions to food access injustices. We do this by advocating for the permanent dismantling of the oppressive systems that cause food insecurity in the first place, one of which we know is racism.
The very fact that Black households are three and a half times more likely to be food insecure than white households in Canada is an example of how anti-Black racism causes food insecurity. The anti-Black racism that we experience that causes disproportionate food insecurity is literally making us sick and taking food out of our mouths. It affects our income levels, access to education, housing, employment and a list longer than we have time for today.
It's important for me to start there because COVID-19 didn't create this reality for us. These inequities existed long before the pandemic, but when you add COVID-19 the result has been that Black Canadians are infected and hospitalized at disproportionately higher rates. We're also three times more likely to know someone who's died from the virus. Every day I worry that I'm going to get a call or see a post notifying me that I've lost someone in my community. That kind of grief, sadly, is not new to us, and neither are the ways that our calls to address these injustices have gone ignored.
Here we are, smack dab in the middle of a third wave of this deadly virus, the collateral impact of which is that our community continues to suffer disproportionately. One of the ways we're seeing this play out in this pandemic is the way that the pandemic has induced delays of surgeries and visits to our doctors, whether it's for a checkup to address an existing or a new health issue. We're not able to get the help we need right now.
I've long said that I believe we only have a sick care system in this country, but ultimately we've been forced to depend on it because it's all that our governments seem to prioritize. I say a “sick care” system because a health care system wouldn't be divorced from ensuring things like access to nutritious food and housing for us all. Again, it's all we have at the moment.
The result of these types of delayed visits to doctors and delayed surgeries will be our worsening health and the deepening of health inequities for a generation. Instead of prioritizing our actual health, the reality for Black Canadians is that we are sentenced to things like food insecurity and now less access to vaccines, less access to testing and even more policing of our communities. Ultimately, more government-sanctioned injustice targeted at Black Canadians.
At the intersection of my identity proudly exists both my Blackness and my queerness. Growing up materially poor, gay and Black means that many of us don't always have the typical family support systems to fall back on in times of need, in times of a job loss or at the onset of a serious illness like COVID-19, not to mention that many in the queer community work in the arts and hospitality sectors that have been decimated by the virus, making, again, queer folks especially vulnerable to food insecurity, homelessness and the health impacts that come with both. Like any group, in times of tumult we cling to our community for support. Many of us find chosen family in our community spaces, ones that are safe and accessible. Safe space that we have long been losing thanks to gentrification.
Week after week another of our community spaces or queer-owned businesses shuts its doors for good. We shouldn't have to suffer more as a result of this pandemic because we're queer, Black, trans, disabled, low-income or a refugee. We all deserve to be protected and kept safe, especially in a crisis like this.
Thank you.