I am a member of the Black Opportunity Fund, which serves to address anti-Black racism in Canada through raising a pool of funds.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we organized town halls to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. I remember doing one of those town halls. One of the parents said, “Is this another experiment that the government is doing on us?” We had to debunk that. There are long-standing issues of mistrust. For example, unethical studies have been done within Black communities that Black people still know about, or are acutely aware of. There is also racism that Black people confront within the health care setting.
That's why I say that competency related to anti-racism is important. When you go to many standards of practice for health care professionals, for example—and I know this is largely not in the federal jurisdiction, but I must mention it—many standards of practice do not even mention the word racism in them, right? That means you can be practising as a health care professional, and be racist. You can still be considered competent, because it's not seen as incompetency based on the standards of practice. We need to change that. We need to ensure that anti-racism is infused in all evaluations, and also in all standards of practice for health care professionals.