With the labor shortage plaguing the health network in Quebec, the government of François Legault proposes in particular to look abroad to attract qualified personnel. Data obtained by The Canadian Press show, however, that the experience of the beneficiary attendants was a dismal failure.
In the spring of 2020, Quebec 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, we learned in documents obtained through the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies.
During a widely publicized press conference on May 28, 2020, as COVID-19 wreaked havoc in Quebec’s CHSLDs, 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. »
The former Minister of Immigration, now at Justice, then said that the program would be deployed in less than a week: it finally took almost a year before it was really launched.
And 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 requests, only 78 candidates were selected by Quebec. In the case of the “study-work” component, the information on the number of successful applications has been redacted. The ministry cited privacy concerns for not disclosing the figure, meaning the data is so small it could identify those involved.
The ministry fights back
Asked to explain the program’s failures, the Department of Immigration 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. It is also pleaded that the program “is part of various initiatives”. However, the latter have not made it possible to approach this objective.
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 at the height of of 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 people who were already working in the network and not additional manpower.
Alongside the efforts of the Department of Immigration, the Department of Health relies on its own foreign headhunting service, Recrutement Santé Québec. 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. In addition, the vast majority of these workers — 185 — were recruited in recent months.
Opposition calls for action
Faced with what they describe as a glaring failure, the opposition parties in Quebec are calling for concrete action.
The Liberal spokesperson for health, André Fortin, speaks of a “particularly distressing” situation since the number one issue in the health network is precisely to attract qualified personnel. “All jurisdictions have understood this! That’s why Ontario and New Brunswick have aggressive recruitment campaigns for our Quebec professionals,” protested the MP for Pontiac. “And during that time, it looks like the CAQ is watching the train go by. »
André Fortin also denounces the fact that the government has not said a word publicly about the failures of the recruitment program. “If we have to change the program, let’s change it. If we need to change the criteria, let’s change them. If we have to aim for different countries, let’s aim elsewhere. But Christian Dubé and Christine Fréchette cannot sit idly by,” asks the Liberal spokesperson.
On the side of Quebec solidaire, it is estimated that “the CAQ is overtaken by its inconsistency in matters of immigration and health”.
“On the one hand, we say that we want to recruit massively and very quickly internationally the people we need,” notes the party’s spokesperson for health, Vincent Marissal. And on the other hand, the CAQ continues to “always suspect immigration of being the main cause of social and linguistic problems in Quebec,” he says. Especially since it is necessary to have attractive positions to offer to attract competent labor, continues Mr. Marissal. “To recruit people — to uproot them, to force them into exile in a way — you still need good sales pitches…”
For the Parti Québécois, this program is “a lamentable failure”, commented its spokesperson for health, Joël Arseneau. “If the mediocre working conditions don’t change and immigration processing times are just as long, we can’t expect foreign workers to want to come and work in the healthcare system. »
Referring to the dashboard of the Ministry of Health, we see that the shortage of orderlies continues to worsen. When the foreign recruitment program came into effect in June 2021, there was a shortage of 2,703 attendants in the health system. According to the most recent figures available, as of December 17, 2022, we were looking for 4258.
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