A Filipino nurse’s fight against racism in Montreal

  “My mom was abandoned and neglected,” Candida Macarine’s daughter Gilda told a virtual news conference. FACEBOOK

Over a year after 86-year-old Filipino mother and grandmother Candida Macarine, was found dead on the floor in a Montreal hospital, a coroner’s report surrounding her death brought no answers to her children.

“My mom was abandoned and neglected,” Candida Macarine’s daughter Gilda told a virtual news conference. Gilda, who is a nurse herself in Canada, believes what happened to their mother was “the result of wilful and gross neglect.“

Macarine was brought to the Lakeshore General Hospital and was admitted on the night of February 26, 2021 due to respiratory distress. Shortly, she was found dead on the floor by hospital staff in the early hours of the next morning of February 27.

The Macarine family was at peace that Candida died of cardiac arrest, as initially thought. The family heard nothing from the hospital, the coroners’ office and the West Island Health Agency about how Candida died. It was only after noticing and connecting the dots from a CBC news story that the family realized that the woman reportedly found “dead and ice cold” on the floor beside her bed in the hospital was their mother.

Fighting racism in health care

The Macarine family accuses the hospital of racism in the death of their matriarch, as the elder’s death in a negative pressure isolation room in the hospital’s emergency room highlighted the fact that she was put into a room which was difficult to see and monitor patients.

Placido Macarine, one of Candida Macarine’s sons, asked, “Is it because we are Asians that they just put us aside and we’re not worthy of their attention? This is racism. I took it like that.”

Not a single word of explanation nor apology was given to the family that Placido explained, “This is clearly for me racial discrimination. This is racism.”

The coroner has ruled that Candida Macarine , 86, died of natural causes after being admitted to the Lakeshore General Hospital due to respiratory distress on Feb. 26, 2021. HANDOUT

The Macarine family initially expressed no faith in the hospital investigation as the family members received no phone call, no letter, and no email. Gilda expressed, “This silence is very disturbing.”

The Lakeshore Hospital apologized on March 23, 2021 to the Macarine family and admitted its communications with them were “incomplete.”

With the coroner’s report a year after surrounding the investigation of the 2021 death of Candida Macarine, it brought no comfort to the family but rather more grief.

“It’s like mourning my mom’s death twice,” said Emmanuel Macarine via a City News Montreal video report, “I thought finally I could go to her grave and say, ‘Mom, we finally have answers for you.”

Lack of political will and action 

“We’re calling on Premier Legault to help our family get the answers. We believe that he has compassion and he understands ordinary families,” Gilda, Candida Macarine’s daughter, said tearfully last year at a virtual press conference, “I’m begging you Mr. Legault.”

In understanding the ordinary families and the Filipino community in Canada, it is noteworthy that a very significant number of Filipinos in Canada work as nurses and in healthcare. The Philippines has been a major source of nurses and healthcare workers whom Canada desperately needs.

Yet, despite the essential contributions to Canada, the Filipino community continues to face discrimination and exploitation- including family separation, de-skilling, housing crisis, and low wages.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only shown the medical crisis Canada and the world is facing, but also the rampant racism, fascism, and class gaps in our societies.

The pandemic also has exposed corruption, lack of political will, necropolitics, white supremacy, systemic racism, and exploitation in the name of ‘essential work’.

While the Filipino community members work and stay dutiful in nursing, healthcare, cleaning, and other essential work, what support is provided to our essential workers and their families who get sick or die amidst the COVID-19 pandemic?

This fight against racism in healthcare by the Macarine family is indeed courageous. The racism and neglect they experienced under Quebec’s and Canada’s healthcare only prove the dire, if not the lack of, support to our essential workers, their families, and communities, which despite having formal complaints brought zero answers, zero comfort, and zero justice.

Additionally, more political will and actions is also needed from the Filipino community, including our consuls, mass organizations, community leaders, elected politicians (including the Parliamentary Secretary for Seniors’ Services and Long-Term Care) and advocates, to work more vigorously against -and to eradicate- racism in all forms, and to support our seniors and their families in times of institutional neglect, and grief.

“My mom died because nobody took care of her in their hospital,” Gilda Macarine, a Filipino nurse in Canada, stated.

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