Mr. Pascal Paradis, I am writing to you to draw your attention to a tragedy that is playing out in your constituency. This concerns the imminent closure of the Bonne Entente day center for elderly people on Avenue du Chanoine-Morel. You are surely aware of the significant collective effort required to keep elderly people at home. As services are few in number, it is often caregivers, including myself, who suffer. I have been caring for both my parents at home for almost eight years now. My father had a major stroke in 2015, he suffered the pandemic like all of us, but the effects were certainly more devastating on elderly people losing their autonomy. Since December 2022, my father has been attending the Center Bonne Entente, and it is a huge breath of fresh air for him. There he meets smiling people and does motor and intellectual activities that help him manage his balance and cognitive problems.
The Center Bonne Entente is a blessed place for my father and for my mother too, who benefits from a little respite when my father leaves the house for the center every Thursday. At the Center Bonne Entente, which is not always the case, elderly people are classified by degree of autonomy, which means that my father rubs shoulders with elderly people in conditions similar to his own. The Center also organizes outings, which are always very popular. It is run by staff who try to keep this community organization, which has existed since 1986, afloat.
The needs are dire everywhere, we all know that, but it seems to me that the survival of this type of organization in the context of an aging population should be very high on the list of government priorities. I am outraged. You are new to politics, and I dare to hope that your few weeks in the National Assembly have not succeeded in transforming you like all the others.
We voted for you in the by-election last October. I accompanied my parents to the advance vote which was ironically held in the same building as the Center Bonne Entente which will close its doors in two months. I am now calling on you so that the voices of Jean-Talon’s elders and caregivers can be heard. If this Center closes, it will be devastating for users and their loved ones. Help us to help them ; the strengths and energy of the generation that follows are not without limits, and this generation, mine, does not deserve to go to the point of exhausting its own resources.
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