Everywhere we look, it’s crazy, we see the cracks in the state growing before our eyes. Let’s talk about three cracks that have made headlines recently.
First, in the daily Montreal Gazette1 : nearly one in five patients leaves the CHUM emergency room before being seen by a doctor. In 15 Montreal hospitals, 12% of patients lose patience with waiting times and leave before seeing a doctor.
In Aaron Derfel’s paper, doctors bear witness to the obvious: it’s dangerous, it puts people at risk.
Then, the directors of youth protection filed their annual report on Tuesday. This is an opportunity to see that the shortage of DYP workers, which existed before the pandemic and which was at the heart of the Laurent commission’s report, is still rife.2.
This means that those at the front are overworked and they do not have the optimal serenity to make crucial decisions about the well-being of children.
Then, Marie-Eve Morasse from The Press comes up with another school service center story that wants to recruit non-legally qualified teachers to address the teacher shortage3. At the end of May, the Auditor General estimated the number at 30,000. And some do not have a university degree4.
Everywhere, in the wall of the State, it cracks, it cracks. Everywhere, services that should be taken for granted are not provided, or provided poorly. It is not specific to certain ministries, to a single state action. I am talking about fundamental missions: school, health, protection of the most vulnerable. Even the CPEs are starting to cough5 : as for nurses, private agencies are beginning to sell educators by the day, at high prices.
It’s not a CAQ disaster. It is a cross-partisan disaster. When I see the Liberals criticizing the current government, I can’t help but think of the Liberal reign from 2003 to 2018 – with the 19-month PQ interlude, starting in 2012: this party governed Quebec for more than a decade and now criticizes the CAQ for the same problems that the PLQ was unable to solve… Ironic.
I look at these headlines on the cracks and I often have the impression that I live in 2023 a kind of perpetual groundhog day: the cracks which grow under the CAQ, we saw them under the PLQ and even under the PQ of… Rene Levesque6.
groundhog day ? It’s a famous film with Bill Murray: this cynical and embittered weatherman relives each day the day before, the day when a groundhog from Pennsylvania announces if we will have an early spring. That’s the impression I get from reading the newspapers: today’s headlines echo those of 2, 3, 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Here, a quote like this: “Exasperated by the long waits, many patients leave the emergency room before even seeing a doctor. The departure rate even reaches 25% in some hospitals…”
No, this sentence was not in the article of the Montreal Gazette which I told you about above. Rather, it is taken from an article in the Montreal JournalSeptember 27, 20147.
I started writing regularly about school around 2015. I had a young child in school then, my friends’ children were in primary and secondary school. Readers wrote to me regularly to tell me about the failings of the school.
I launched the punctual section If school was important in this column. Hundreds of teachers began to write to me to tell me about their daily lives as teachers overloaded with classes where students in difficulty are overrepresented and delivered to regular classes without sufficient support from remedial teachers, special education technicians and proven technological tools…
These teachers spoke to me of professional burnout, of increasingly pressing career reorientation desires.
These resignations, they knew, were contributing to a shortage of teachers whose symptoms were making headlines at the start of the school year…
Advance the cursor to 2023: the teachers still tell me about the same class problems where students in difficulty monopolize most of their energies. They are still exhausted.
And they are still leaving the business at a staggering rate.
The difference with 2015 is that we are now talking about the shortage of teachers all year round, not just during the start of the school year. But that’s fine, we’ll get used to teachers not legally qualified – but willing – teaching our children. As we got used to the 16, 17 and 18 hour wait in the emergency room for a sprained ankle.
In 2015, school failings were a PQ and Liberal responsibility. In 2023, in the fifth year of a CAQ government, the shortcomings of Quebec schools are a cumulative responsibility of the PQ, Liberals and CAQ.
I look at Jean-François Roberge’s four-year term as Minister of Education, and if you want a metaphor for cross-partisan immobility made in Quebec, think of his reform of the school boards. School boards have become “school service centres” that employ the same general managers, the same human resources consultants, the same lawyers and the same public relations specialists who say the same empty phrases in press releases whose content has been changed. head.
Quebec is groundhog day. At least in the movie Bill Murray learned every day from his mistakes the night before, he ended up avoiding stepping foot in a puddle8.
Not us.