I would like you to take the time to think about the most difficult product to find in Canada and Quebec. Is it a new or used car? Delays are improving, you may receive it more quickly than last year. Is it a reasonably priced house? Good news ! The stocks of houses available on the market are constantly increasing and prices are falling. Are they illegal drugs? From what we see in The Press with its coverage of the opioid epidemic, it doesn’t seem like hard-to-find stuff.
You might have guessed it, the hardest product to find right now in the country is nothing less than simple Tylenol for kids. A product we’ve been selling since the 1950s. Nothing revolutionary about how it’s made, but I challenge you to find some at your local pharmacy. I can tell you that after visiting a dozen (yes, you read that right, a dozen!) pharmacies for Tylenol for my 21-month-old, I was able to find the “last” bottle that a nice pharmacist at my local Jean Coutu had hidden in the back of her shelf behind the cash register.
I live on the island of Montreal, in the second largest city in a G7 country and I am unable to get Tylenol for my child.
Worse still, the two major emergency rooms for children (Children’s and Sainte-Justine) are completely overwhelmed, in particular because of children suffering from respiratory problems. In fact, the Montreal Children’s Hospital, the nearest emergency room to my house, has an occupancy rate of 108% and a waiting time of approximately 12 hours. It is reasonable to believe that the Tylenol crisis has only accentuated the crisis that our hospitals are experiencing.
Choice of company
This umpteenth crisis affecting our children only highlights an even more serious social situation: we don’t give a damn about the next generation. As I write these lines, our Prime Minister has just announced an additional $500 million in assistance for Ukraine, bringing our total assistance to over $1 billion. I have nothing against supporting Ukraine and its humanitarian crisis, but imagine if we had just spent a fraction of that amount to help our own children. You can be sure that the Tylenol crisis would have subsided very quickly.
Also, at the time of writing these lines, Health Canada has just issued a terse press release confirming that we have just guaranteed a supply from abroad. Alas, this supply will not arrive for “several weeks”. This means that difficult weeks are to be expected for all parents, children, nurses, doctors, daycare workers, grandparents and all those who take care of our little ones. A crisis could have been avoided, but for some unknown reason, our dear technocrats did nothing and when the problem arose, they chose to blame the parents.
All of this is in addition to the infant formula crisis which has hit the United States most of all, but which has also affected Canada, the perpetual war to get into subsidized daycare centers or CPEs, the obsolescence of our public schools, the underinvestment in our sports facilities and our libraries and so on. As a young parent, I am stunned by our society’s lack of interest in our children. Then we wonder why our birth rate in Quebec keeps falling. I sincerely hope that the Tylenol crisis will be a collective wake-up call for all of us.