With the labor shortage plaguing the health network in Quebec, the CAQ government proposes in particular to look abroad to attract qualified personnel. The data obtained by The Canadian Press demonstrate, however, that the experience of the beneficiary attendants was a dismal failure.
In the spring of 2020, François Legault’s Coalition avenir Québec government promised to recruit 550 beneficiary attendants per year abroad. Result of the operation? The immigration pilot program set up for the occasion has so far selected only 78 candidates, learned The Canadian Press in documents obtained through the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies.
To get back into the context, it was at the start of the pandemic when COVID-19 was wreaking havoc in residential and long-term care centers (CHSLDs) that Quebec announced its program with great fanfare.
In a widely publicized press conference on May 28, 2020, then Immigration Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette said, “With the pilot program, we are sending a clear signal. We aim to select 550 beneficiary attendants annually, because the needs are urgent, especially in our CHSLDs. »
The former Minister of Immigration, now at Justice, added that this program would be deployed in less than a week. It finally took almost a year before it was really launched.
This same pilot program was therefore announced a second time by a new Minister of Immigration, Nadine Girault, in March 2021.
Once again, the Minister reiterated that the program should make it possible to “select up to 550 applicants annually”. Candidates could take two paths, that of work for already qualified personnel, or that of work-study to obtain training before integrating the health network.
As mentioned previously, the results are far from the announced targets. Since March 31, 2021, 210 applications have been received, including 197 for the “work” component. Then, among these 197 applications, only 78 candidates were selected by Quebec.
In the case of the “study-work” component, the data on the number of successful applications has been redacted. The ministry cited privacy concerns for not disclosing the information, which means the data is too weak and could identify those involved.
The ministry fights back
Asked to explain the failures of the pilot program, the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI) first tried to minimize the failure by presenting the number of 550 as “a maximum threshold” rather than a target, thus contradicting former Minister Jolin-Barrette.
Then, we defend ourselves by arguing that this program “is part of various initiatives of the Quebec government to meet labor needs”.
However, the other initiatives have not made it possible to reach the famous target of 550 beneficiary attendants per year from abroad.
The only real wave of massive hiring is due to the “Special program for asylum seekers during the COVID-19 period”, the objective of which was to reward those dubbed “guardian angels” by Prime Minister François Legault in stronger from the first waves of the pandemic.
This program alone made it possible to regularize the status of 1,643 people between March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2022. However, these are personnel who were already working in the network and not additional manpower. .
Not better at Recrutement Santé Québec
Alongside the efforts of the Department of Immigration, the Department of Health relies on its own headhunting service abroad with “Recrutement Santé Québec (RSQ)”. Again, the data obtained by The Canadian Press indicate that we are a long way from the hundreds of beneficiary attendants coming to the rescue of seniors in CHSLDs.
Since the year 2019-2020 (the data being compiled from September 1 to August 31), we have managed to attract 282 beneficiary attendants to Quebec. Moreover, the vast majority of these workers were recruited in recent months.
From 1er September 2022 through mid-January 2023, it is reported to have attracted 185 beneficiary attendants from overseas, more than in the previous five years combined.
In the office of the Minister of Health Christian Dubé, we respond that international recruitment is “one of the solutions to find more personnel in our health network”.
“There are great stories in our network right now with new workers arriving from all over the world and coming to share their expertise in our network. We are proud of it! “, we add.
Four major regions have shared the reception of most of these newcomers since 2019-2020. Montreal and the Capitale-Nationale region each integrated 56 beneficiary attendants, while the CISSS de la Montérégie welcomed 49 and the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS opened its doors to 31 immigrant workers.
Referring to the dashboard of the Ministry of Health, on which Minister Christian Dubé relies to analyze the state of the network, we see that the shortage continues to worsen. When the foreign recruitment program came into effect in June 2021, there were 2,703 employees short. According to the most recent figures available, as of December 17, 2022, we were looking for 4258.
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