Refused in hospitals, kept away from public health experts and limited to information from government press briefings, journalists had to redouble their efforts during the pandemic to tell what was really going on in the field. Gathered virtually during their annual congress on Saturday, the members of the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (FPJQ) shared their experiences and frustrations with this difficult access to information.
In March 2020, it was “chaos and fear”, recalls Aaron Derfel, daily journalist The Gazette, who was invited to participate in a panel on government control of image and message.
At the time, it was not yet a question of masks or vaccines. Little was known about the virus. A “spirit of solidarity” quickly set in, remembers Mr. Derfel, and everyone – “even journalists” – naturally lined up behind the Prime Minister, François Legault. After all, he was the one who held the information on the evolution of the pandemic and he reported it religiously in his daily 1 p.m. appointments.
But “the purpose of the press conferences is to control the message, to limit the questions”, notes Aaron Derfel, expressing his discomfort with this operation from the start of the crisis. Because on the ground, its sources – developed thanks to its 23 years to cover the health – brought back horror stories to it.
The journalist revealed the crisis in the Herron private CHSLD in Dorval in March 2020. He compared the place to a concentration camp when residents were found left to themselves in a degrading state and even lifeless for some .
“Mr. Legault presented himself as the good father who brings people together, it took that at the start of the crisis. No one knew what was going on, we were afraid of our neighbor, of our dog, we washed our grocery store. We needed this “District 13” every day to know what was going on, ”replied at the table the former attaché for the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) François R. Pouliot, who was still behind the scenes. of power in the first wave.
He does not believe that the government wanted to withhold information from the public, rather it was a matter of being able to choose when and how the information would be disclosed.
Whoever has since made the leap into journalism believes that there has been “a before and after Aaron Derfeld”. “You came to show that everything was not under control in the end,” he said to his colleague from The Gazette. He also told him that there was “perhaps a part of sensitivity to criticism” in Mr. Legault when the latter temporarily blocked the journalist on Twitter following his series of messages dissecting the information disclosed.
Many journalists after the publication of Mr Derfeld’s investigation questioned political decisions or the official daily toll of the number of COVID-19-related deaths. They also tried by all means to obtain images of the interior of health establishments, to which access was systematically refused to them for fear of contagion. Some have improvised as volunteers in a CHSLD, others have asked health workers to wear a camera on their protective equipment.
They still had to be convinced, of course, since the “law of silence” has reigned in the health network and has been doing so since long before the pandemic, unanimously stressed the speakers present.
Access to information
Beyond the omertà which operates in several circles, it is administrative slowness and “the lack of political will” that complicate journalists’ access to information.
Those who multiply access to information requests no longer even count the number of heavily redacted documents they have received. Not to mention the ever-increasing delays, argued Marie-Christine Trottier, research journalist at the Bureau of Investigation of the Journal of Montreal, who was participating in a discussion about the loopholes in the law that will turn 40 in 2022.
At his side, Monique Dumont, retired journalist-researcher, said that she “had fun” making access to information requests during the pandemic to better understand the decisions of Quebec. “I realized that either there was no documentation upstream to explain a decision, or worse still the decisions were in no way justified,” she was offended.
The obligation to document the main elements of a decision is moreover one of the “holes” in the law, according to the president of the Access to Information Commission, Diane Poitras. ” [Une des choses que] the pandemic has shown, it is all the importance of allowing citizens to understand the decisions which were taken and which sometimes severely limited their freedom. “