There is something to scream about when we see the isolation in quasi-prison conditions of children described as simply “tagging” in a youth center managed by the DPJ.
It is The Press who revealed1 that a lack of space at the Cartier youth center in Laval means that children, sometimes as young as 9 years old, are isolated in cells for the “crime” of having been unruly during a meal.
What we call the “withdrawal unit” comes from an ancient world and reflects the dilapidation of the place. There are cells there where children are sent not because they represent a danger to themselves or to others, but because they have been “troublesome”.
“We’re going to make monsters out of them,” declared one of the journalists’ sources Caroline Touzin and Ariane Lacoursière.
All the commotion in Quebec: Minister Lionel Carmant has called for an investigation and the Commission on Human Rights and Youth Rights has also announced its own investigation.
My bug: the deputy minister in charge of the investigation of the Ministry of Health and Social Services, Catherine Lemay, heads the structure which has not seen that in Laval, children are sent to what we must call cells.
Mme Lemay comes from the DPJ machine, no one can doubt her expertise in youth protection. In addition to her title of deputy minister, she has that of “national director of youth protection”.
Butme Lemay is first and foremost a deputy minister. Deputy ministers are not programmed to embarrass their department (and their minister). If there are embarrassing observations to be made, the deputy ministers make them behind closed doors… But it is therefore a deputy minister who is sent to investigate the incarcerations of children in a DPJ center in Laval .
The risk here is that we replay in the film “Horacio Arruda”, national director of public health in his time, also deputy minister and who walked hand in hand with politics, often in defiance of science. The complaints that bothered the government during the pandemic did not come from the National Directorate of Public Health headed by Deputy Minister Arruda, they came from university experts in public health and regional directorates.
I’m talking about DPJ. I’m talking about a pandemic. But basically, I’m talking about counter-powers, these institutions that irritate power, regardless of the party that exercises it.
Take the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information, what is called the access to information law. This law is in fact a law on denial of access to documents of public bodies, made up of so many exceptions and such broad industrial secrecy protection clauses that when you finally access a document, you do not learn much.
It’s true in Quebec, it’s true in Ottawa. And despite promises to reform the laws over the years so that access to information is the norm rather than the exception, nothing changes.
For what ?
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that these laws which make access to public documents more complex are a guarantee of message control for governments, a vaccine against political embarrassment.
Take Northvolt. Journalists cannot really count on the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies to get an idea of what the Swedish battery giant intends to release into the air and water2. The documents that journalists manage to obtain are most of the time so redacted that one has the impression of consulting the road map of a foreign country… without the names of the cities, villages and road numbers.
Still in the counter-power aspect: Northvolt could have publicly explained the ins and outs of its project as part of an evaluation by the Bureau d’audiences publique sur l’environnement (BAPE). But a regulatory change (which came into force in July 2023) before the start of official procedures for authorization of the project (in September 2023) means that Northvolt does not have to submit its entire project to a such assessment3. It’s… providential timing.
I come back to the children of the DPJ. A bill is being studied in Quebec to follow up on a recommendation from the Laurent commission, namely the creation of a position of children’s rights commissioner. The kind of counter-power that should be screaming for the children of the DPJ, whether they are treated like detainees or not…
However, Minister Lionel Carmant does not want this commissioner to have too many powers4, which earned him an outcry. Even Régine Laurent expressed reservations5.
What’s the point of having a children’s rights commissioner if he is toothless from the moment the position is created?
My cynical response: it limits the damage that such counter-power can inflict on a government.
1. Read the file “Tannants in retreat in cells”
2. Read the article from Duty “A document redacted at the request of Northvolt”
3. Read the article ““We wouldn’t have had a project” with a BAPE, says Benoit Charette”
4. Read the article from Duty “Carmant inflexible on the powers of the future commissioner for children’s rights”
5. Read the article “Quebec creates a position of commissioner for the well-being and rights of children”