COVID-19 and Race: Canada’s blind spot?
“In Canada, in my opinion, what happened was that we fell victim to narratives that we were already in love with.” — Shree Paradkar, Toronto Star columnist
When talking about the shared experience of living through COVID-19, a phrase that is often used is “We are all in this together.” Yet, in Canada, data suggests that the pandemic has disproportionately affected racialized communities.
Data from Toronto Public Health this summer suggested that 83 per cent of all infections in Toronto were among people of colour— a number that was brought up early-on Friday during the panel discussion happening at Carleton University’s online Journalism in the Time of Crisis conference.
Beverly Bain, a professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto and Shree Paradkar, a columnist at the Toronto Star, said this “in it together” view stems from Canada’s inability to recognize its own systemic racism. They were joined on the panel by Ashton Lattimore, editor-in-chief of Prism and Danielle Kilgo, of the University of Minnesota.
“When the media and Canadian (state) were using ‘We are all in this together’, it was really a consolidation around whiteness. The reporters on all major news channels were white, medical professionals, except for Dr. Tam, were all visibly white,” Bain said during the panel on the underreporting of the racialized impact of COVID-19.
The panel was moderated by CBC Ottawa anchor Adrian Harewood, who is also an adjunct professor of journalism at Carleton, teaching a new course this year on journalism and race.
In fact, Bain said the treatment in public discourse of Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, was a symptom of Canada’s systemic racism. Bain was referring to Conservative MP Derek Sloan’s attack on Canada’s top doctor.
“Her expertise on the handling of the crisis was questioned by a Conservative MP accusing her of protecting Chinese interests over that of Canada,” Bain said. “Because she was Chinese, she was immediately linked to some sort of underhanded implication in protecting China’s interests as opposed to Canada’s interests.”
Bain told Harewood that Black and Indigenous people also experienced harsh policing by the authorities during the pandemic.
Paradkar added that when she first arrived in Canada as an immigrant, Canadian journalists were unwilling to recognize their country’s systemic racism. “Some 15 years ago when I first arrived as an immigrant, it was not at all uncommon for journalists in this country to talk about us (Canadians) as being post-racial,” she said.
“I hear of Toronto being boasted about, as the city that people actually meant when they talked of New York, for instance, or the Statue of Liberty actually embodying what Toronto and Canada (stood for).”
The tendency of Canadian media to focus on instances, rather than systems, created certain blind spots. “[Canada has] a media that doesn’t understand systemic racism, that thinks racism doesn’t deserve coverage unless a racist incident has occurred,” Paradkar said.
Advocacy groups called on Ontario, Canada’s largest province by population, to gather data on the impact of COVID-19 on racialized individuals. Paradkar said the provincial government did not heed the call.
Referring to Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer David Williams, she said, “He said that regardless of race, Ontario’s government treats everybody equally. So there was once again, this refusal to accept that systemic racism exists.”
Universal health care could also not stop people from falling through the cracks.
“The prominent health advocate Angela Robertson told me back in April, that she heard that if people were they were turning up at emergency departments and being asked to pay $500 per treatment if they were not documented,” she said.
According to Paradkar, there is a fundamental underlying cause behind the Canadian media’s blind spot. “In Canada, in my opinion, what happened was we that fell victim to narratives that we were already in love with.”
A full video of the panel discussion can be found here.
