You only have to pick up a paper to see different incidents happening in hospitals across Canada, but in Ontario we have had recent incidents of racism happen in hospitals across the province, with some incidents leading to people not surviving.
We feel that if a bigger penalty was applied for a racist incident, those incidents would probably stop, but people get a little slap on the wrist or they're told not to come back to work for a few days and nothing happens. The community knows this. They know that if a situation occurs, they're not going to be the ones who are hurt.
We have the Patient Ombudsman's office, which we've been working closely with to put in an indigenous early resolution specialist position, and that's helping. We've also been working more closely with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, but the other part of this is education and creating understanding across hospitals when it comes to cultural safety. We work closely with partners like the Indigenous Primary Health Care Council, which has done cultural safety training that helps to show people what's appropriate and what's not appropriate.
I think a lot of it is based on ignorance and people just not understanding how offensive they are when they say certain things to indigenous people. I don't think it comes from a place of malice necessarily, but one of ignorance. We need to do more to educate health care providers and the health care system about cultural awareness and cultural safety. We are working to do that, but there's an onus on them to step forward as well.
The other part of that is the need for resources so that workers in our health care system can afford to take time away from their incredibly busy schedules to take this type of training. I think it's really important that people understand the true history of this country and the role that first nations have played, and the other nations as well, but most people don't. A lot of folks in the health care system are newcomers to Canada and they don't have any concept of the history.
More needs to be done to improve understanding of the history of Canada, the role that indigenous people have played and the historical traumas that have been perpetuated on them, which have led to what we see in communities today. People are still struggling to break free of that and come out from under the shackles of residential schools and the discriminatory policies in the Indian Act. So many things are still in place today, and it's hard to come out of that when they're still there.
Indigenous people are incredibly resilient. Where 20 or 30 years ago they would have just accepted what somebody told them, they're now standing their ground and saying, “Wait a minute; I'm not going to take that from you.” We are doing our bit to make sure we're pushing back on those types of behaviours, and I see communities stepping up more and more on that.