The Minister responsible for Indigenous Affairs, Ian Lafrenière, said on Tuesday he had commissioned a report on the case of Aby Piétacho, sent home five times by staff at the hospital in Havre-Saint-Pierre, despite a tumor that left her put at risk of paralysis.
The duty revealed on Monday the story of this Innu child, who finally managed to obtain care for a complex vascular tumor in Montreal, then in Quebec.
“As a father”, Minister Lafrenière said he was “extremely shocked and saddened” by the story of Aby, who will be two years old in a few days. “I can’t wait to read the report, to see what happened there,” he said.
Mr. Lafrenière spoke about Aby Piétacho as part of the study of credits, an annual accountability exercise on the expenditures and performance of departments. He was first challenged by Liberal MP Gregory Kelley.
“It’s something that comes up often. [Les Autochtones disent] : “we arrive in the health system and we are not treated like the others”, he lamented.
His colleague from Québec solidaire Manon Massé underlined the “courage” and “determination” of Aby’s mother, Marie-Rose Piétacho, and of the band council of her community, Ekuanitshit. It’s M.me Piétacho who decided to drive 12 hours, to Montreal, to obtain a new medical opinion about his daughter. The little one, who was eight months old at the time of the events, was transferred by airliner, at the expense of the community.
“Aby Piétacho is the tip of the iceberg”, worried Mme Mass. Given the many cases of discrimination she hears about “in the field”, she challenged the minister on the subject of the government’s refusal to count health complaints according to the ethnocultural origin of the people who make them. “It is essential to document the situation,” she insisted.
Minister Lafrenière said he “has done a lot of work in this direction” and is “in the process of evaluating” this possibility, which constitutes a recommendation of the Commission of Inquiry on Relations between Aboriginal Peoples and Certain Public Services in Quebec ( Come committee).