The Minister of Transport, François Bonnardel, announced last week that 24,000 victims disabled following a road accident would see their compensation increased. Their income replacement indemnity would be extended beyond age 68. Other benefits would be increased from an overall kitty of $1 billion from the surplus appearing on the balance sheet of the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ).
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
If the road victims concerned are right to be jubilant, it should be noted that these new benefits increase the already numerous disparities between the various Quebec compensation plans. Injured workers will continue to see the Standards, Equity, Health and Safety Commission (CNESST) end all income replacement at age 68, a ceiling established in 1985. Worse again, most victims of criminal acts affected by last October’s reform will see their income replacement completely interrupted three years after the event.
Rather than tending towards the harmonization and simplification of public compensation plans, the CAQ government continues to complicate them by multiplying the disparities.
The injured workers did not flinch from having been ignored by last week’s announcement and not being entitled to the same consideration. For them, the achievement of 68 years corresponds to a real ordeal, to indigence.
In 1972, when the Crime Victims Compensation Act (IVAC), the Bourassa government was concerned with harmonizing their rights with those of injured workers, as a matter of fairness. In 1978, the entry into force of the Motor Insurance Act introduced an entirely new regime, distinct from the first two. In 1985, new reform for injured workers who were freed from the IVAC system. From then on and since that time, a cat does not find her young there. And to think that these disparate regimes are aimed at disabled, medicated and often undereducated citizens. Why make it simple when you can make it complicated ?
The opposite of fairness and simplicity
At the beginning of the 1980s, the great mandarin of the Quebec State Robert Sauvé, mandated to set up the Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CSST), dreamed of creating a vast income that would compensate all claimants equally regardless of the cause of their disability. Today we are the opposite of this objective based on fairness and simplicity.
Go and explain to Marco, a 34-year-old Gaspé resident, why the CNESST will pay him $2,134 for the permanent after-effects of his chronic lumbar sprain when a road accident would have brought him $5,318.
We can console him by telling him that he will be entitled to an individualized rehabilitation plan, which the SAAQ would probably not have offered him since his law does not oblige him to do so. Or that if he had instead been the victim of a criminal act, his file would not be handled locally in Gaspé, but by ghost officials centralized in Montreal, unreachable, whom he would never meet in person.
In this complicated and messy world, victims get lost and struggle to assert their rights. Officials, in principle responsible for guiding them through bureaucratic intricacies, are difficult to access and reluctant to explain to them the how and why.
In 2003, Jean Charest’s Liberals made a commitment to hold a broad consultation aimed at harmonizing and simplifying Quebec compensation plans. A promise, like so many others, which has not been followed up. The Legault government, for its part, can always say that it has promised nothing of the sort. However, it is not too late to put coherence on the agenda.