Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the artisans of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Relationshipssummer 2023, noh 821.
March 2023. When I enter the room where my mother is hospitalized following a fall, she exclaims: “How you have grown! Yet far from childhood, faced with delirium and the other troubling realities of late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, I feel like I’ve aged 100 years.
During the day, I sing to her The soul to tenderness ; in the evening, my soul is sad, without having the head to talk to you about anything else, to dissociate myself from this situation as society generally demands. Like thousands of people in Quebec, my sisters and I have been making up for several months for the lack of resources and staff that has an impact on the lives of so many elderly and sick people, at home or elsewhere (the unit where we spend long hours will close in May for this reason, but what does it matter at a time when we dare to close emergencies?). God knows what awaits us on the way to waiting for a place in a CHSLD for our mother.
Of course, my family will (perhaps) not experience the nightmare that Denys Desjardins recounts in his heartbreaking documentary I placed my mother. On the set of Everybody talks about it, on March 12, he added his voice to all those who are calling on Prime Minister François Legault so that families will never again be prevented from visiting their vulnerable loved ones housed in a residential center or hospital, as was the cases during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 5,000 deaths in CHSLDs later, including that of the director’s mother, this film poignantly shows the vital nature of supporting loved ones and the need not to be dispossessed nor of the ties that help to live, even in proximity to death, or participation in decisions about the best possible care.
We can say to ourselves, just like Denys Desjardins, that since we are not stopping them collectively with determination, we are tolerating a number of aberrations and ordinary minor acts of violence: the lack of public accommodation for seniors; the absurd 24-hour time limit to be respected once you finally get a place; the diapers of the sick left full for too long by a devalued and exhausted staff; the proliferation of rooms for three or four people, which increase the risk of contagion – a measure which had however been abolished in 2017 and which was authorized again by the government on July 2.
Challenging François Legault on the matter as if he were the man for the job will not yield the expected result: he is part of the political and economic elite who pushed the neoliberal reforms leading to the current disaster and who knows that will always have the means to escape the fate of the majority and the poorest by paying for private care. This elite must be taken out of places of power if we want to hope to transform our society, which is bogged down in dysfunctions and often does not know how to act accordingly with the knowledge and knowledge at its disposal. Because we have known for a long time that the aging of the population in Quebec is such that it requires much more than what is in place to deal with it.
By the end of 2023, the Health and Welfare Commissioner is due to recommend ways the government can provide more home care for older people. However, the means of achieving this are already known and the question is rather to know what will force this government to do anything other than announce, as it did in its last budget, some $193 million a year for this care, while the auditor general estimates the sums required for this care at no less than 2 billion a year, recalls a recent press release from the Association of Pensioners and Retirees from Education and Other Public Services of Quebec.
By lowering taxes in favor of the richest, it deprives itself in an aberrant way of a similar sum (1.7 billion per year) which could have been allocated to public and community services, among other priorities. Where can we see the desire to create the necessary balance between improving home care and the equally necessary creation of the thousands of rooms in specialized accommodation that are currently lacking, in places other than the overly expensive seniors’ homes or the gloomy neo-hospices handed over to the greedy claws of private actors?
As Denys Desjardins says, “I’m afraid of the world in which we are going to grow old”. I fear that Quebec is incapable of growing (a nod to my mother) and of giving itself a responsible government, capable of carrying out the revolution that is needed in the whole field of care and resources for the elderly, including palliative care accessible to anyone in need. I fear a society that, meanwhile, prefers to congratulate itself on expanding access to medical assistance in dying.
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