Ashley Wilkinson has found racism is an ongoing challenge in health-care settings in Canada, which is why the PhD candidate at the University of Northern British Columbia is getting the first-hand accounts of Black and Indigenous people who say they've experienced it.

For her doctoral work, Wilkinson, who's also a research co-ordinator at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., has been interviewing unhoused people in various Canadian communities to learn if racism is impacting their efforts to get proper health care.

"I've heard everything from micro-aggressions, racial slurs, physical violence, a lot of assumptions being made about people [regarding] substance use and the challenges that they're facing, just based on the fact that they're Indigenous," said Wilkinson.

Across the boar

See Full Page