Posted at 9:00 a.m.
I am the mother of a 33 year old handicapped adult child, who is not autonomous and who lives with me. My son wants to stay with me. I get $1500 a year to take care of him. If my neighbor takes my son into foster care, she will receive approximately $50,000 per year. What will you do to financially take care of parents who are caring for their disabled adult child?
Sylvie Desjardins
Francois Legault: We have begun to improve the assistance given to parents. You know, Marguerite Blais and Marilyne Picard, who is the parent of a severely handicapped child, have worked a lot on this. We even made announcements to add help. But – and I remember meeting Sophie Prégent and Charles Lafortune – there is still a challenge. What happens after 18? And I know that there are parents who are almost afraid to die because they say to themselves: “What will happen with my child? » So there is as much housing as the assistance that is given… We have taken steps to give more assistance because, in fact, it is not normal to say that we want to give more raised to the neighbor than to the mother or the father who wants to keep his child. We have started to act and we will continue. But it is an important subject for me and an important subject also for Lionel Carmant.
What do you intend to do about the housing crisis and excessive rent increases?
Sylvain Labelle
Francois Legault: First, let’s look at affordable and social housing. We have 15,000 that are under construction, we have 2.6 billion invested, so those are in the process of being done. The Ministry of Housing and the Ministry of Finance calculate that in 10 years, there will be a shortage of 23,500. I do not have figures for four years, so what we did, we said: “ we divide that by two” and we will build 11,700 over the next term. We put 1.8 billion. According to the Department of Finance and the Department of Housing, this should solve all the problems of affordable and social housing in all cities in Quebec. But there is another problem too, and that is housing for the middle class. Obviously people spent less during the pandemic. Salaries are rising. Supply and demand make the price increase (although we have residences that cost much less in Montreal than in Toronto and Vancouver). But the only way to help is to help create wealth, which we are doing by increasing wages significantly. I see a political party saying, “I’m going to cancel the welcome tax, I’m going to give direct aid. If everyone has direct help, through supply and demand, the price of the house will increase by that amount. So we have to enrich Quebeckers. And that’s my obsession. We have gone from a 16% wealth gap with Ontario to 13%. We have to bring it back to zero.
I am a 74 year old senior. I admired you for your management of the pandemic and the way you manage the state as a good father. But the money you spend on seniors’ homes doesn’t make sense, those homes are only going to house a handful of seniors. Why offer this luxury to a few people and leave others in the misery of CHSLDs?
Mary Burke
Francois Legault: First, do not oppose home care and CHSLDs and seniors’ homes. In 2018, we promised to increase the budget for home care and services by $800 million. We increased it by 2 billion. And we are proposing another improvement in our financial framework. We have to do everything and I agree, people want to stay at home as much as possible. It’s true that seniors’ homes are expensive. New standards, as a result of the pandemic, are expensive. They are brighter. There is only one person per room. They are equipped with modern amenities. But no one is going to tell me that it’s too good for our elders. We are in the process of renovating the CHSLDs and our goal is to have seniors’ homes for everyone, everywhere, for people who are no longer independent and who need full-time care.
Interview by Alexandre Sirois
Note: no concern for clarity, the questions and answers have sometimes been condensed.