Gary Bloch is a family physician with Unity Health Toronto, Physician Lead, Equity and Social Interventions with the St. Michael’s Academic Family Health Team and an associate professor at the University of Toronto.
A backlash against EDIA (equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility) is gripping Canadian medicine. The reasons for this backlash are complex but ultimately misguided.
The amount being offered to some people with disabilities, $200 per month, is a drop in the bucket in a time of high inflation, rising rents and significant added costs to living with a disability.
This pandemic, placed on top of the longstanding social pandemic, has created a "syndemic" – a synergistic pandemic – in which the spark of COVID has ignited a tinderbox of social inequity.