Whether racism is ‘shocking’ stirs colleges of physicians and surgeons national meeting

The Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada (FMRAC) wanted to debate racism at its national meeting in Quebec City on June 12—and it got its wish. The theme of this year’s meeting—which brings registrars and other top staff from the nation’s colleges of physicians and surgeons together—was “eradicating Indigenous-specific and other forms of racism and discrimination.” During his speech on June 12, Michel Jean, a Quebec television journalist of Innu descent, said that when he was covering the death of Joyce Echaquan the CBC ran the video Echaquan had recorded of herself in hospital along with the audio of her own screams but the CBC didn’t run the audio of the healthcare workers disparaging Echaquan. Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman, recorded seven minutes of video in Sept. 28, 2020 at the Centre hospitalier de Lanaudière in Saint-Charles-Borromée, Quebec. During the video, at least two hospital employees can be heard insulting her in French while she moaned in pain. One employee asked if she was “done acting stupid.” Echaquan was told she was only “good for sex” and that the employees were the ones “paying for this” and that she was “stupid as hell.” Echaquan died later that day—according to her family she was allergic to morphine. Read: Indigenous physician and his husband win Amazing Race Canada Jean, who is the weekend anchor of TVA Nouvelles on TVA, said at the FMRAC meeting that his bosses asked if they should perhaps not run the audio of the hospital employees, but Jean said they should. He argued that Indigenous people hear this kind of insults directed at them all the time and it was time that white Quebecers heard it. Jean argued that perhaps the CBC didn’t run the audio out of a desire to “protect." But Dr. James Makokis, a Cree family physician, took to the microphone and challenged that suggestion, arguing the CBC had censored the comments. He explained in an interview after the session: “It’s interesting because when we look at news media stories about Indigenous people there’s always very graphic depictions about what happened that further stereotype Indigenous people as lazy or having addictions or prone to crime but when it is about non-Indigenous people doing something to Indigenous people—in this case Joyce Echaquan—the first response is to censor that. And why somebody would want to censor that is because it calls into question what Canadians think and view about themselves: this narrative that they tell themselves that they’re kind and compassionate and humanitarian people which may be the case in other parts of the world but when it comes to the original peoples of this land . . . it is not the case for us. So I think that was why they wanted to censor that because it is hard for people to hear the truth and reality of what we’re going through on a daily basis.” A white Quebec doctor got up to say at the microphone that he worked the ER two days after the incident occurred and “nurses were crying and doctors were shocked” about what had happened. Santanna Hernandez, who is Indigenous and the president of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students, said she was stunned that “that people are shocked because this is my experience all the time.” “It is very exhausting as a (minority) to hear in these spaces that people are surprised” by racism such as happened in the Echaquan case, she said.

Whether racism is ‘shocking’ stirs colleges of physicians and surgeons national meeting

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