It’s an open secret. If François Legault talks so much about immigration and even deportation of asylum seekers, it is partly to distract from public services which are creaking everywhere. And it works.
His statements being as astonishing as they are changing, everyone is talking about them. It’s hypnotic like an accident. Impossible to look elsewhere.
However, during this time, new alarms about the state of public services are being sounded. Here are four among others.
1) In the second report of its tour of Quebec, the College of Physicians paints a detailed portrait of a hospital network on the verge of collapse.
2) Rightly, coroner Me Francine Danais denounces the growing lack of training and supervision of beneficiary attendants across Quebec.
“This profession needs to be supervised,” she says. “Truck drivers, electricians and carpenters are better supervised than beneficiary attendants.” Read again…
Agents are in fact trained hastily in the public network or completely illegally in private schools.
Result: we endanger the health, safety and lives of the most vulnerable Quebecers. First of all, seniors who are losing their independence and adults with intellectual disabilities living in accommodation resources.
Dehumanization of public services
3) A comprehensive report from the Québec Ombudsman documents the growing dehumanization of the health network, social services and public services as a whole.
Citizens, he notes, are subject to rigid, disembodied bureaucratic machines that are increasingly devoid of humanity. I will come back to it.
4) The Press reports that a directive from the Ministry of Health “prohibits its health establishments from managing claims to the federal dental care plan, judging that this is an interference in its field of competence”.
Translation: less fortunate seniors, children and people with disabilities will be deprived of the new federal system. They thus become hostages of yet another dispute with Ottawa. A shame.
Small politics
The result of a request from the NDP, the federal plan, significantly more comprehensive than Quebec’s programs, must nevertheless cover many Quebecers who, unlike ministers and civil servants, do NOT have the means to pay for essential dental care. their health and well-being.
The president of the Association of Dental Surgeons of Quebec, Dr Carl Tremblay did not mince his words: “I find this odious and unworthy of the Minister of Health. It’s petty politics at the expense of the poor.” “We are depriving patients of a program for which they paid taxes like all Canadians. It’s unfair.”
Above all, it is an open denial of social justice and public health.
If it does not back down or does not commit to offering the same expanded coverage provided by the federal government, the CAQ government would also prove that its “nationalism”, in addition to being a smokescreen, has not of heart.
Does he really want to do this?…