Bill on cultural safety in health coming, Quebec says, following forced sterilizations study

Nearly a year after the Quebec government's self-imposed deadline passed to enshrine cultural sensitivity into its health-care law, the province's Indigenous affairs minister says it will finally introduce a bill to do so by the end of this parliamentary session. 

Ian Lafrenière renewed his government's promise Friday, just days after the release of a report that found at least 22 Indigenous women in Quebec had been forced or coerced into sterilization between 1980 and 2019, a practice that has been tied to colonialism and genocide. 

The report is the latest among several to scrutinize the treatment of Indigenous peoples by health-care services in Quebec.

Lafrenière said the bill to include the principle of cultural safety into the law wasn't passed in the spring as promised, because the Coalition Avenir Québec government wanted to address the issue in a separate bill, instead of including it in another one, as initially planned.

"I'm sorry it wasn't done last spring," he said in an interview on Quebec AM Friday. "We want to send a strong message, so we decided to postpone it. It's going to be done in the next weeks to a month. So at the beginning of this session, it's going to be done."

Though a Radio-Canada investigation last September unveiled cases of forced sterilization among Black and Indigenous women in Quebec, the issue had not been formally studied in the province as Quebec refused to be a part of a federal initiative in 2019 to examine the practice of forced sterilization across the country. 

The report, by researchers based at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT), detailed the stories of women from four First Nations, as well as Inuit women, who were pressured, coerced or misled into sterilization procedures. They were between aged 17 to 46 at the time of the procedures.

This summer, the Senate committee on Human Rights called for the criminalization of forced sterilization, after it heard emotional testimony from nine people who had lived through procedures without their consent. 

Senator Yvonne Boyer, who is a member of the Métis Nation of Ontario and a member of the committee who has advocated on the issue of forced sterilization, said that she believes the UQAT study will result in more women in Quebec coming forward with their experiences. 

"It had previously been difficult to get in and to be able to talk to women [in Quebec] that were wanting to come forward," Boyer said, also in an interview with CBC's Quebec AM this week, referring to the province declining to be part of the national effort looking into the practice. 

"When women hear about other women who have been sterilized, they, for various reasons, feel a little more empowered because the whole act of sterilization is so traumatic on people," she added.

Tensions between the provincial government and Indigenous leadership in the province have mounted over the course of the more than four years the Coalition Avenir Québec government has been in power.

Among the points of contention are François Legault's reversal of a 2018 electoral promise to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as his government's refusal to adopt Joyce's Principle — a call to guarantee Indigenous people the right to equitable access to social and health services, following the death of Joyce Echaquan at Joliette Hospital. 

In September, CBC News reported that the Indigenous sensitivity training devised after Echaquan's death was deemed "superficial" and "cringe-worthy" by Indigenous health professionals. The Health Ministry later promised to address the issues they pointed out.