00:01:33.380and acknowledges them as the traditional owners and custodians of these lands.
00:01:37.580I mention this because I think it's going to come in handy later.
00:01:40.320So right from the introduction, you get a sense that the Code is a set of metaphysical claims rooted in radical leftist scholarship like critical race theory and maybe postcolonial theory.
00:01:52.680If we look here, it says the Code of Ethics reflects the CNA's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and anti-racism.
00:02:00.540And it also acknowledges the historical and continuous impacts of white capitalized European centric models of nursing and health have perpetuated on anti and have have on the perpetuation of anti-indigenous racism, anti-black racism and other types of racism.
00:02:18.000So it's the same language that we see again and again and again, only this time in nursing.
00:02:25.140And this is a real departure from bedside care or patient dignity.
00:02:29.380Reading through the Code feels like a call for re-educating nurses to see themselves as climate activists, decolonial warriors and spiritual interpreters of planetary health.
00:02:40.940While the Code does include values that you might recognize for nurses, like respecting patient choices and providing compassionate care and showing integrity on the job.
00:02:51.260It also includes a whole value section dedicated to promoting social justice.
00:02:56.920So right off the start, we're saying that a political ideology, namely social justice, rooted in a distinct set of philosophical ideas from Marx to Fanon to Butler is considered a professionally required ethical behavior.
00:03:14.580Ethics codes are supposed to establish professional boundaries.
00:03:19.580They tell practitioners what counts as misconduct, what principles should guide their practice and where to draw the line between care and harm.
00:03:28.500But the new CNA code of ethics muddies that line.
00:03:33.500It does ask nurses to view patients, institutions and even themselves through an activist lens.
00:03:39.500We're not really dealing with ethics so much anymore.
00:03:43.500We're dealing with ethics as a political doctrine loyal to Herbert Marcuse's no tolerance from movements to the right.
00:03:51.420It's not explicitly stated in this document, but the social justice scholars that underpin the ideas in this document absolutely are explicit about that.
00:04:02.060Now, let's take the section 1.4.6 when it talks about, you know, modeling a respectful and inclusive environment that is free from any form of workplace harassment, bullying, violence in all its forms.
00:04:17.4201.4.9, refraining from acting in a way that may cause harm to another person.
00:04:22.780Again, on the surface, that is what we want.
00:04:25.920But let's take these words a little bit further.
00:04:28.780Let's let's dig deeper into the meaning of some of these words and what's happened in the past.
00:04:33.960As I'm sure you're aware, dear viewer, that these terms have experienced so much concept creep over the last decade that not wanting your daughter to share a changing room with a trans identified male is probably considered an offense under all of these categories.
00:04:49.440Other regulators haven't hesitated going after professionals who don't align with this new morality.
00:04:54.200In 2022, Dr. Jordan Peterson faced disciplinary action from the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
00:05:02.200For his public statements criticizing gender ideology and social justice principle, something for which he's quite well known at this point,
00:05:10.200the CPO felt that Dr. Peterson's dissent was discriminatory and unprofessional.
00:05:15.260The complaints were centered on his tweets and interviews and perceived transphobic microaggressions, despite no direct link with his clinical practice.
00:05:24.860Now, the CPO was clearly able to exceed its mandate, ordering re-education or else license suspension.
00:05:31.940If a regulatory body can go after Dr. Peterson, probably one of the most famous Canadians, for expanding views on cultural ideas in his own time,
00:05:43.480imagine what they can do to you within your own profession under the concept of harm, right?
00:05:49.840Causing harm, which is kind of what Dr. Peterson was accused of doing.
00:05:53.540So, in Dr. Peterson's case, the overreach was upheld by the Ontario Divisional Court,
00:05:59.480and it highlights how regulatory bodies can stretch their authority to police legitimate speech
00:06:05.360that doesn't really align with the value of promoting social justice, as the Code puts it.
00:06:11.620So, for a trusted profession, do they think this approach will help or hinder the public's view of them?
00:06:17.940Now, incidentally, I'm not sure if that re-education will be televised, but I very much hope that it will.
00:06:26.780And that brings us to the Canadian Nurses Association's use of identity politics and decolonial language,
00:06:36.760because what they're really doing is rewriting what counts as moral and who's allowed to speak.
00:06:45.780Let's take a listen to a CNA representative discussing climate activism.
00:06:51.140The thing I wanted to say is that because planetary health is an interdisciplinary field,
00:06:55.700it's also a social movement, that means that we really need to capitalize on ensuring that interdisciplinarity is at the core of engagement.
00:07:05.420And that means that everyone needs to be represented rather than having someone speak on behalf of another profession.
00:07:11.700And so, that also kind of aligns with when we talk about equity, what does equity mean when we talk about representation from socially disadvantaged groups in decision making.
00:07:22.900So, I think with respect to making sure that planetary health is addressed within different settings,
00:07:28.260one thing I wanted to kind of end on is that they also need to be taking into account the different contexts of practice from a demographic, geographical region.
00:07:36.940And we know that Canadians across the country live in very diverse settings from urban, rural and remote.
00:07:42.680And we also know that different populations have very distinct needs.
00:07:47.100And so, remembering to do with and not to or not for, but rather with and in partnership,
00:07:52.900especially when it comes to working alongside Indigenous communities,
00:07:56.560is really key in making sure that we really are aligning with planetary health principles.
00:08:02.000The Canadian Nurses Association says nurses must acknowledge the inherent connections between nature, humans, plants and animals and non-living entities,
00:08:13.160which I'll point to later in just a second now.
00:08:15.880They call it the planetary health lens, which is what we heard in this video, obtained from Indigenous epistemologies,
00:08:22.840that it must guide not just cultural awareness, but scientific research, clinical intervention and policy advocacy.
00:08:30.280That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
00:10:13.600He asserts that colonialism itself is a system of violence and that the only effective response to that violence is counterviolence that surpasses it, right?
00:10:23.100So framing violence as a necessary tool for dismantling this colonial oppression.
00:10:27.560Fanon doesn't mean hurty words either.
00:12:06.860And that includes things like our plants and our growing systems.
00:12:09.260So the medicines we would have used, those traditional practices, they were sort of dismissed in favor of that European way, the way it needed to happen, that Western approach to medicine, which was just inherently at odds with the traditional ways that we would have lived.
00:12:24.060When we were in our own faces, longhouses, we couldn't live in community the same way.
00:12:30.500So there's a number of things that were just impacted that then, of course, impacted overall health and wellness.
00:12:39.500But it's not just for citizens of European descent.
00:12:42.560If you're a recent immigrant, you're included in this.
00:12:45.760A few months back, British Columbia NDP MLA Rohini Arora urged all Canadians to call themselves settlers, uninvited guests and colonizers as a kind of a moral duty.
00:12:57.520She called it a gesture of reflection.
00:12:59.340A few weeks ago, in estimates, I heard the member for Columbia River, Revelstoke, express discomfort with the terms settler, uninvited guest and colonizer.
00:13:12.840That prompted me to deeply reflect on where these terms come from and why they matter.
00:13:20.200Even if we didn't personally cause colonization, we live in a country shaped by it.
00:13:26.100That's why many non-Indigenous people, including myself, use the term settler, uninvited guest, or for white folks who self-describe as colonizer.
00:13:39.400It reminds us that we are here because of a colonial system that still impacts Indigenous communities today.
00:13:46.520Through historically underfunded services, title rights, over-policing, boil water advisories, the legacy of residential schools, and missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.
00:14:02.680Some may feel uncomfortable with these terms, but they are not meant to divide us.
00:14:07.180When we understand the history, we see why they matter.
00:14:12.360These words remind us that we live, work, and benefit from being on Indigenous land.
00:14:19.040Land that was often taken without consent, especially here in British Columbia.
00:14:28.920I was born here, but my family came from India, through Canada's colonial immigration system, a country and system built on the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
00:15:25.480Now, Rohini claims that this isn't about blame, but I think it kind of is.
00:15:31.540The scholarship makes no bones about it.
00:15:33.780Those born with the settler title, born in the settler group, are by definition part of the problem.
00:15:40.920And that's why the code provides this handy guide to land acknowledgement etiquette.
00:15:45.900It's asking you to say where your ancestors originated from, as though the fact that your great, great, great grandparents moved to Ontario, say, in 1850, marks you as some kind of inauthentic citizen or inauthentically belonging to the land.
00:16:01.980They must accept a lower moral status as a result.
00:16:06.160Refusing to do so might have you dismissed as, I don't know, racist, harmful or worse, colonial.
00:16:14.100Now, remember the land acknowledgement from the start?
00:16:17.180That Indigenous peoples are the rightful owners of the land?
00:17:20.300You see it in the emphasis on things like equity, deserving groups, and in the way that the document assigns a moral status based on which group you belong to.
00:17:29.460The CNA has fully absorbed this logic.
00:17:32.900Nurses are told to view care through an anti-racist lens and that they must reflect on their power and privilege in a nod to CRT so that they can dismantle systemic racism and that the only way of doing that is becoming an anti-racist.
00:17:46.840But we know that in practice, it means that neutrality itself is a form of complicity, that rejecting the epistemologies underpinning social justice ideology is in and of itself evidence of isms and phobias, that silence is violence.
00:18:04.500The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination.
00:18:09.420The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
00:18:13.540The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
00:18:17.640Now, that is your anti-racist hero, Ibram X. Kendi.
00:18:20.900So it tells you everything that you need to know.
00:18:23.320My friends, this is what the Canadian Nurses Code is implying without overtly saying it.
00:18:28.080While the USA has realized their folly and making attempts to move away from racism disguised as anti-racism, Canada plows ahead, unencumbered.
00:18:38.620Let's talk about misinformation and disinformation.
00:18:41.360These words should make the hairs on the backs of all nurses stand on end because what do they mean by misinformation and disinformation?
00:19:18.740During the pandemic, Dr. Charles Hoff, a physician in British Columbia, raised early concerns about vaccine side effects.
00:19:27.080His license was threatened and his career nearly ended.
00:19:30.420The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia issued a citation against him in February 2022,
00:19:36.480alleging that he'd made misleading, incorrect and inflammatory statements about vaccinations and treatments relating to public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:19:47.200This winter, however, the College of Physicians dropped the professional misconduct case with Dr. Hoff,
00:19:52.660citing that circumstances surrounding the disciplinary action of his case had materially changed and they no longer needed to proceed.
00:20:03.300I guess the Ministry of Truth changed their mind about what constitutes misinformation.
00:20:07.340So ask yourself, what if a nurse publicly questioned the scientific validity of using traditional herbal medicines to treat serious illnesses?
00:20:16.940What if she cited a study or pointed to a lack of empirical support for using said herbal medicines?
00:20:24.420Would she be punished for a racism incident?
00:20:27.460It's just not clear in the code what can and can't happen because the social justice ideology isn't really based on objective standards.
00:20:34.300It's based on a fluid, ever-changing form of ideology that clearly doesn't express any of its limitations.