A woman shocked staff and patients at an Ontario clinic after she demanded that a "white doctor" who "doesn't have brown teeth" and "speaks English" treat her son, a video of the incident confirms.
Witness Hitesh Bhardwaj filmed the incident while waiting for an appointment at a clinic called Rapid Access to Medical Specialists in Mississauga, Ontario.
Mississauga is a multicultural city, with a mixed population of South Indian, white European, black and Chinese origin citizens.
The woman in the video complains at length about the supposed lack of white doctors at the clinic, saying, "Being white in this country I should just shoot myself."
She also said, "I would like to see a white doctor. You're telling me there isn't one white doctor in this whole entire building?"
Witness Bhardwaj says he filmed the incident as a record of the inappropriate behavior, so that it did not go unnoticed in broader society.
"I couldn't stop thinking about it," Bhardwaj told CBC. "The whole episode kept on repeating in my head, I was very upset. You know I can't even define the feeling."
A woman who witnessed the incident alongside Bhardwaj told the woman, "Your child clearly has more issues with you being his mother than him needing to see a doctor. You are extremely rude and racist."
The woman responded to witnesses' comments by saying that they were "attacking me because I'm white."
Local police said they were called to clinic due to a "disturbance," which was resolved and ended in the woman's son being treated by a doctor at the clinic.
Witnesses to the incident did not bring forward any legal allegations against the woman.
President-elect of the Ontario Medical Association Dr. Nadia Alam said that this was not an isolated incident, telling CBC Toronto, "I've seen it through medical school, I've seen it through residency, I've seen it on and off through my practice. Sometimes it is openly like 'I'm not going to see you because you're this skin color or you have this accent. I want to see somebody else.target="_blank"'>