Shortly before his death, Jacques Parizeau confided to Michel Lacombe’s microphone that he had found his role as constituency deputy very useful while he occupied other more demanding and prestigious ministerial positions.
He explained that if the top of the ivory tower may seem at first glance an incomparable point of view for appreciating the whole of society, it loses all of the detail of what happens there daily. If only elected officials and senior officials of the health network could agree on this evidence and allow Quebec to benefit as a whole.
Instead, over the past 20 years, mergers have followed one another, each time pushing decision-makers further away from the floor. The most recent, which we owe to Gaétan Barrette, was the most undemocratic.
In its wake, the reform liner imposed centralization of the management of laboratory examinations on the entire Gaspé at the Rimouski hospital center. Since then, unsurprisingly, we have observed a deterioration in the working conditions of laboratory technicians and in the service provided to the various hospital departments, and an absurd difficulty in obtaining adjustments that go without saying for the local actors. The result: a demotivated work team that no longer has confidence in its employer.
The catch is that the majority of lab technicians here have chosen not to be vaccinated, with the foreseeable consequences that this implies for our region. The employer having lost all credibility, it is impossible for him to influence their decision.
The postponement of the deadline has given us a welcome respite. I now invite the Minister to consider the specific situations in the room and to accept, when they exist locally, solutions allowing to spare the goat and the cabbage, and to privilege each time the solution which best serves the mission of his ministry, sometimes the remedy is worse than the problem itself.
Better yet, I invite him to show his good intentions and to anticipate the planned decentralization (announced on October 19) by giving back their autonomy to the Gaspé medical laboratories and by trusting today in his local managers for the development and application of solutions.