Breaking the Cycle: Confronting Healthcare Disparities for Indigenous Peoples in Canada – The McGill Daily
October 2, 2023
The government of Canada has worked over the years to achieve reconciliation with Indigenous peoples through a restored engagement between nations, governments, the Inuit, and the Crown, stemming from an underlying basic acknowledgment of rights, respect, cooperation, and partnership as the cornerstone for revolutionary change. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (UNDRIP) provides a framework for the Government of Canada’s implementation of the rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was created after UN Special Rapporteur Jose Martinez Cobo released a study about the systemic discrimination of Indigenous peoples worldwide. It affirms the UNDRIP’s status as an international human rights act with applicability in Canadian law, which is especially significant with the increasing number of Indigenous peoples in Canada. According to the 2016 census results from Statistics Canada, 13,100 Indigenous people were living in the Montreal agglomeration and 34,745 in the greater Montreal metropolitan area, a statistic that grew to a total of 46,085 Indigenous identities in 2021 according to the census. This makes for a very large increase solely in the Montreal metropolitan area, with additional significant growth of 1.9 per cent per year, totaling 8 per cent, of the Indigenous population in Canada from 2016 to 2021.
