“I’d like to see a white doctor.”

“You’re telling me there’s not one white doctor in this whole entire building?”

“I’m not going there with all those Paki doctors.”

It’s tough reading these statements. Even harder watching it. I can only imagine what one must feel in the moment being on the receiving end of such racist vitriol. At first blush, one might think that this scene unfolds in a place where fear and xenophobia have reached a fever pitch. Places in the United States like Wisconsin and Kansaswhere minorities have paid with their lives for simply wearing turbans or being darker-skinned.

You would be wrong. This happened in Mississauga. A city whose mayor extolled the virtues of its multiculturalism by saying, “Mississauga is home to people from every corner of the globe and all points in between. We are blessed to be the destination of choice for so many newcomers looking to make Canada their home.”

A woman is overheard in a clinic demanding a "white doctor" for her son. Her face is obscured to protect the identity of the child.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, this incident is not an isolated one. As a South Asian physician-in-training, I have personally experienced and witnessed overt racism by select patients and their families. But I have it easy — I was born in Canada, speak English without an accent, and was educated in North America.

For my colleagues from abroad, who are also known as International Medical Graduates (IMGs), their experiences with racism are often much more severe. Most people don’t appreciate just how hard it is for IMGs to practice in North America. In fact, a recent study published in the British Medical Journal suggests that IMGs may provide higher-quality care than those trained in the United States.

Here in Canada, we think of ourselves differently than Americans. For example, while slavery was legal in Canada until 1833, it doesn't have the same lingering legacy as in the U.S. — although our First Nations and Japanese internment victims may disagree with that assertion. Therefore, race-relations are far less apparent in our collective national consciousness than in the United States.

Indeed, we often congratulate ourselves on the fact that we are one of the most multicultural countries in the world as proof that somehow we are actually a model post-racial utopia. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Since the election in the United States, things have changed north of the 49th parallel. There has been a dramatic rise in racially motivated hate crimes, a terrorist attack targeting Muslims, and a politician who ran a prejudiced campaign under the neo-patriotic guise of Canadian values — straight out of the Steve Bannon playbook. This is in addition to a long-standing discriminatory policing policy affecting Black people that has even received the attention of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

There is no doubt that we in Canada have race-related issues and are far from being the racially harmonious country we like to tell ourselves we are.

I remember growing up in Toronto and loving ice hockey despite being scrawny, bespectacled and brown-skinned. I remember being regularly called a “dirty-Paki” by members of the opposing teams, and in one instance during a high school ball hockey tournament, having to relocate team benches due to other students hurling racist insults at me, not to mention spitting and throwing debris.

Importantly, and unfortunately, my experiences are not unique, but rather endemic within the minds and lives of other ethnic people in Canada.

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I love Canada. We have a lot to be proud of as a society. But we need to do better. We must do better.

On the eve of our 150th anniversary as a nation, we can no longer rest on our laurels by comparing ourselves to other countries whose threshold for bigotry, sexism and xenophobia has reached new lows. If we expect to champion our values of pluralism, tolerance and inclusion on the world’s stage, we must first take a long hard look in the mirror.

Adam Kassam is a third-year resident physician in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Western University.

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