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Kwame Julius McKenzie is a British-Canadian psychiatrist employed as the CEO of Wellesley Institute, a policy think tank based in Toronto, Ontario. McKenzie is a full professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He has worked as physician, researcher, policy advisor, journalist and broadcaster.
He serves as a member of Employment and Social Development Canada's National Advisory Council on Poverty, and is a Co-chair of the Expert Task Force on Substance Misuse under Health Canada. He is the Medical Director of Health Equity at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). He formerly sat on the Board of Directors of the Ontario Hospital Association, and on the Transition Planning Special Committee. He also serves on the Ontario Health Data Council for the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
McKenzie was Chair of the Research and Evaluation Advisory Committee for the universal basic income pilot program in Ontario in 2017. He has been a member of the board for United Way Toronto.
He is also a member of the Minister of Health's COVID-19 Testing and Tracing Advisory panel alongside Kieran Moore, Chief Medical Officer of Health for Public Health Ontario. A report published by the panel in March 2021 concluded that among other factors, teachers' COVID-19 vaccination status must be taken into account when developing and implementing school-based SARS-CoV-2 testing and tracing policies.Bogoch, I., Krajden, M., Longtin, J., McKenzie, K., Moore, K., Naylor, D., Pilla, D., Wilson, B., Yiu, V., Zelmer, J., Paish, S., Dhalla, I., Liu, M., Downer, M., Yan, T., Rotenberg, S., Rajesh, N. U., Cooper, J., & Arora, R. (2021). Priority strategies to optimize testing and screening for primary and secondary schools. Health Canada. Retrieved 2022-05-20.
McKenzie was also a presenter on All in the Mind on BBC Radio 4, and has previously been a columnist for The Times and The Guardian newspapers in the UK, writing on issues of health, racism and equity, as well as being a frequent guest on Canadian radio and television.
In 2005 McKenzie wrote an article in The Times, UK about racial stereotyping in the 2005 film King Kong, co-written, produced, and directed by Peter Jackson. In the piece titled, "Big black and bad stereotyping", McKenzie described it as feeding "into all the colonial hysteria about Black hyper-sexuality." The article received such a strong response from readers that McKenzie and The Times issued a challenge asking the public to find positive Black images on television during the holiday season.
In December 2021, McKenzie wrote an opinion piece in the Toronto Star calling for a strategy to avert Vaccine equity in racialized children.
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