Residents in Upper Hammonds Plains say recent zoning changes will help stop the "gentrification" of their historic African Nova Scotian community as they plan for the future. Halifax regional council has approved changes to tighten the area's zoning laws which had not been altered since the 1980s following years of community pressure.
News Gina Jones-Wilson, president of the Upper Hammonds Plains Community Development Association and community coordinator for the vaccine clinic held in Upper Hammonds Plains, says it’s a long-overdue development. “We are effected by so many diseases on a higher scale than most, so in order for the health system to address our needs, they need that data,” she told The Coast. In the US, we know that 41 percent of Black people have high blood pressure, compared to just 27 percent of white folks. There are no such stats in Canada, but Jones-Wilson says high blood pressure and diabetes are more common in Black communities. She says when community groups get together, sometimes the conversation turns to health problems, and the group realizes the same issues are effecting everyone in the room or are present in their family history. It’s about five or six of those diseases that were in every Black community here in Nova Scotia, says Jones-Wilson.
A second town hall gave information on vaccines and allowed members of the ANS community to ask questions. “There is a lot of misinformation about the vaccine, and so with that in mind, we put on the town hall,” says doctor David Haase, a retired infectious diseases and internal medicine physician, and past co-president of HAAC. “Recognizing that for the Black communities mistrust is not just the vaccine, it’s much broader, it’s embedded in systemic racism and the way that our population has been treated or mistreated over the years.” Haase and doctors faced questions about everything from whether the vaccine contained microchips to whether it would alter someone’s DNA. “We had doctor Gaynor Watson-Creed, the deputy chief medical officer of health, give a very nice talk about the vaccine as well and go through the different vaccines,” he tells The Coast in a Zoom call.
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