The Minister of Seniors and Caregivers, Marguerite Blais, is due to testify on Friday as part of the investigation into the deaths that occurred in CHSLDs during the first pandemic wave. Coroner Géhane Kamel has already heard from two former ministers of health (Réjean Hébert and Danielle McCann), a deputy minister, management of residential centers, a representative of the Institut national de santé publique du Québec and many others. ‘other leaders still. The areopagus of high-ranking officers totals around forty witnesses.
The coroner reiterates that her objective is not to find the culprits, but to prevent the tragedy from repeating itself. No culprits, okay, but those responsible?
Minister Blais herself said in an interview with Radio-Canada last year that she was assuming her “share of responsibility” for the tragedy while also pinning the national director of public health, Horacio Arruda, who resigned this year. week, and François Legault, “who has the power and who decides the orientations”.
What then is the responsibility of the public authorities in such a tragic context? The question, put to Professor Damien Contandriopoulos of the University of Victoria, sets off a theoretical chain reaction. First, sending an electronic version of the book Responsibility and judgment, by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. Then an extract from his essay From lies to violence, in which she reflects on accountability in our modern bureaucratized societies.
Since ancient Greece, she notes, strong terminology has been used to designate forms of government, “as systems of domination of man over man,” of the domination of one or one. small number (monarchy, oligarchy) to the domination of the best (aristocracy), up to that of the majority (democracy).
“Nowadays, we would have to add the last form, perhaps the most impressive of all these hegemonies: bureaucracy, the power of a complex system of offices where neither one, nor the best, nor the few, nor the majority, where no one can be held responsible, and which we can quite rightly qualify as the reign of the Anonymous [rule of Nobody], writes Hannah Arendt. If we qualify as tyranny, in accordance with traditional political thought, a government which is not held to account for its actions, the reign of the Anonymous is undoubtedly the most tyrannical of all, since one does not see in the end account person who is likely to answer for what has been accomplished. “
So has the pandemic exposed this form of bureaucratic tyranny? “Yes, and we can see it clearly with the coroner’s inquest on CHSLDs: we cannot attribute the systemic dysfunction to an individual, so we end up with the impression that it is no one’s fault”, answers Professor Contandriopoulos, director of the Institute on Aging, School of Nursing, University of British Columbia.
He believes, like the coroner, that the inquest must seek to avoid the reproduction of the evil already done, and he points to “organizational causes”, including the reform of the former liberal minister Gaétan Barrette, which removed the capacity management and the privatization of accommodation centers, here as in Ontario. The Quebec health policy specialist is moreover even more severe with what he observes in his adopted corner of the country.
“What resonates with me is Arendt’s idea of the bureaucratization of societies which takes powers away from the individual. This is nothing new, but in the context of COVID, it fascinates me to see governments like the one in British Columbia […], absolutely cynically, are revising the causes of death in hospitals, are reimposing very, very strong censorship on data access, are adopting deeply undemocratic policies. The government apparatus implements these decisions without seeing any checks and balances taking place. “
Insensitivity
Professor Pascale Devette, from the Department of Political Science at UdeM, refuses to speak of organized irresponsibility. She points out that according to Hannah Arendt, of whom she is an expert, even in the darkest moments of history, people remain responsible for their actions.
“Only, at the global and systemic level, a regime may or may not encourage a feeling of responsibility,” she writes in Duty in response to a question asking if it is still possible to assign political responsibilities. “However, we remain responsible even if we do not really feel it. But not feeling your responsibility induces a disconnection between yourself and others and will have effects on the quality of our actions and our judgment. “
She therefore prefers to speak of “organized insensitivity”, with some doing the work of care and attention to leave to others “the privilege of indifference,” she said. “Given the lack of political attention, we can deduce, unfortunately without great surprise, that the lives of seniors in CHSLDs seem to count less, says the specialist of Arendt and Albert Camus, whose research focuses on the tragic, excess and violence.
“The equal dignity of all life is a principle without effect if it is not integrated into a political and social system which ensures that this life will have the conditions necessary to be livable. We cannot repair the past, nor restore dignity to those who died in isolation, in anguish and in anonymity. We can, however, try to grasp the meaning of what happened beyond technical analysis. What kind of social sensitivity do we participate in? Who does my attention benefit from? Am I sensitive to others beyond the social, economic and political compartments which contribute to the accounting of human lives and which encourage indifference to others? “
The duty
The question of responsibility also obviously arises at the other end of the spectrum of society, no longer for the “system”, the bureaucracy or the public authorities, but for individuals. The decision of the Quebec government to impose a “health contribution” on non-vaccinated people stems from a desire to punish people deemed irresponsible.
“An interesting argument is being heard these days, an argument that it is not for individuals to bear the burden of failing a government to secure the collective good,” wrote philosophy professor Ryoa Chung after a long interview. ” […] This argument cannot justify the disempowerment of individuals in relation to the common well-being or the needs of vulnerable people. It can indeed be argued that individual resources and capacities are limited, but we cannot shirk our ethical responsibility (within the limits of our capacities), even in the face of collective problems or “structural injustices” that we do. did not directly cause. “
She adds that the foundation of all individual existence is individual responsibility. “The freedom of some is never unlimited (contrary to an erroneous perception of individual rights), recalls Mr.me Chung. It is always marked by respect for the freedom of others, just as a responsible government must keep in view a fair balance between respect for individual rights and collective well-being. “