The Island Health authority has issued an overdose advisory for Greater Victoria. The advisory, issued on Tuesday afternoon, states there “is an increase of overdoses in the Greater Victoria area.” Island Health is reminding people to call 911, provide rescue breathing and give naloxone if someone overdoses.
On September 28, 2020, Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year old Atikamekw woman from Manawan, died in the Centre hospitalier de Lanaudiere in Joliette, Quebec. The livestreamed video recorded before her death shows at least 2 hospital employees hurling racist, hateful insults at her. Joyce died shortly after recording the video. She had also been restrained to her hospital bed. This was not the first racist incident at the hospital that Joyce had experienced in her short life. Her death, and the growing pandemic of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada has sparked national protests, calling for reforms and giving urgency to the anti-racist movement in our country.
We need to make our voices heard, to acknowledge that systemic racism exists in Canada, to address this racism, and carry our voices all the way to Parliament.
We must call on the federal government to adopt anti-racism as a sixth pillar of the Canada Health Act, prohibiting discrimination based on race and affords everyone the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law.
The Canadian Public Health Association supports this call to action. I urge each of you (as individuals) and your respective organizations endorse this call.
It is time to act. We need your support.
On behalf of PHABC we appreciated the call to act on systemic racism and lend our voice to this Call for Support. It is fully consistent with our policies and intention to address inequalities in Canada and our active projects with the BIPOC community in BC.
I am also pleased to include my name as an individual and anticipate our membership will be pleased to as well. I am ccing our communications team so that this can be widely shared on our social media.
Social gatherings in private homes are now limited to your immediate household—the people who live in your home— plus a maximum of six other people. This is a province-wide order that applies to all homes for all occasions. The order will be posted online in full detail in the coming days here: https://www.gov.bc.ca/phoguidance.
School meal programs should be more than a meal — they should anchor school curriculum and root kids into their school, advocates say.
Canada is the only G7 country without a national school meal program, with a patchwork of school-based and regional programs partially filling a gap exacerbated by the pandemic. It’s an inadequate system that needs reform — an opportunity, say advocates pushing for a universal, national school lunch program, to rethink the role of food in Canadian schools.
“There’s three reasons why we don’t have a national school food program in Canada,” said Debbie Field, co-ordinator for the Coalition for Healthy School Food, a national organization advocating for a Canada-wide school food program.
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