I entered an integrated health and social services center (CISSS) 15 years ago with the promise of changing the world. How ? By getting 5 year olds to talk so that these treasures can finally say “I love you” for the first time to their mom and dad. I am a speech therapist.
Today I am on strike, and I am neither a nurse nor a teacher. I am a speech therapist within a CISSS, therefore, and I treat in a specialized manner children who do not speak or speak very little at 5 years old due to disorders of neurological origin.
Last week, a friend who owns a lucrative private company told me this: “It is not by paying health care workers more that you will work more. » I replied, smiling sadly: “Oh my, my friend, but I have lost hope of winning more. To tell you the truth, I no longer even have the hope of not getting poorer — #inflation. » Advice to my beautiful 14-year-old daughter: don’t become a speech therapist. That’s too much effort for so little in return. Come on, find yourself a typically masculine job, and then you might have the chance to be a well-paid Quebec woman.
However, I completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology, taking care to only obtain A’s in order to succeed in entering the master’s degree in speech therapy — a very limited and even more demanding program. I then completed a two-year master’s degree in speech therapy that was heavy on academic credits, but also so heavy on quality of life that my fellow students were losing their hair. I have since become a qualified speech therapist whose actions are attributable to me since I am a member of a professional order.
I entered the CISSS in 2007 with a very intelligent head and full of hope. Since then, successive governments have imposed on me one after the other to see the children in groups, to see the children during fewer meetings, to see more children every day, lark! Our prime ministers and their revolutionary ideas to resolve my speech therapy waiting list have come and gone, but I remained there, with my waiting list still full, while they had already left.
It is 2023, I am a speech therapist in a CISSS in the dear Act Early program of the Coalition Avenir Québec and I am paid less than a primary school teacher. Read: my salary is lower than that of a teacher. This is not an exaggeration to fuel rhetoric, it is a real fact. The number of speech therapists is so small compared to the number of nurses and teachers that we are always forgotten by governments at the negotiating tables, negotiation after negotiation. That’s what it’s like to be on strike when you’re neither a teacher nor a nurse.
Come on, I’ll leave you, because Léo, 5 years old, is waiting for me without the CISSS waiting room. Come on, Leo, I’ll see you for an hour every two weeks. Quick, quick, I have to exercise all my academic knowledge so that you can say “I love you” to your mom for the first time. But you’re going to have to do this quickly, Leo, suddenly the minister decides that I can only see you eight times this year. Oh yes, I also have to be on the picket line at 10 a.m. See you soon !