Obviously, François Legault did not like to be told that he was disrespecting the thousands of seniors swept away by the first wave by holding a press briefing on the vaccination of children on Tuesday evening, a few hours after the unveiling of a devastating report from the Ombudsperson on the massacre in CHSLDs.
“To be told that we are disrespectful when I have been here day after day after day, seven days a week, offering my condolences to everyone and that was one of the hardest of my life… ”
We could sense the Prime Minister’s exasperation.
You could feel it boiling, inside.
And, frankly… we can understand that. For days, platform managers of all kinds – and I include myself in this – have questioned its management of the pandemic. Opposition parties accuse the government of lying. To hide things. To try to create a diversion.
And yet, we have seen it. François Legault was there, day after day after day, flanked by the Dr Horacio Arruda and Danielle McCann, then Minister of Health and Social Services.
Glued to our televisions, we followed the trio, every day at 1 p.m. No one can doubt that it was the hardest time of their life. They struggled. They did all they could to prevent disaster.
Despite everything, they escaped him.
The report of the Ombudsperson, Marie Rinfret, painfully recalls this. His findings are overwhelming. This one, above all: the 4,000 seniors who died in the spring of 2020 in CHSLDs have been forgotten.
In the hubbub of pandemic preparation, we did not think of them. When we woke up, it was too late. The fire was caught.
It is an appalling tragedy, a historic crisis that deserves, in my opinion, a historic response: a public commission of inquiry. I’ve claimed it twice, first in May 2020 and then last week. Other chroniclers claim it. The opposition parties too.
But… that won’t happen.
The government refuses outright. He doesn’t have the slightest intention of doing the exercise. First, because four investigations must already shed light on the management of the pandemic. The Ombudsperson, the Coroner, the Health Commissioner and the Auditor General have powers equivalent to those of a public commission of inquiry. They can compel people to testify and produce documents.
In short, according to the government, these four bodies can do the job very well. What is the point of spending millions to scratch – again – the sore?
However, it is not the waste of public funds that the government fears above all else. More like public lynching.
He fears that prosecutors in a commission of inquiry will be under enormous pressure to identify culprits and distribute the blame. He fears that elected officials and state managers will be released into the lion’s den.
People who, let us remember, have shown dedication throughout this unprecedented crisis. And who do not deserve to be treated as criminals in an investigation broadcast on 24-hour news channels.
This is what the government wants to avoid at all costs. And he might not be wrong.
This can be seen in the content of the attacks launched in recent days by the opposition. Again on Wednesday, the Liberal Party of Quebec accused the government of having “lied to Quebecers”. The Parti Québécois invited Coroner Géhane Kamel to hear the Dr Arruda, Mme McCann and two deputy ministers because they would “not have told him the truth” during their first testimony.
It is true that the mess of the last few days is causing a mess. But it is clear that the government is especially attacked, harshly, for what it said during the coroner’s inquest, and not for what it did – or not – in the spring of 2020.
Let’s say that it shouldn’t make him want to launch a public inquiry too much …
Still, you need one.
The idea is not to put Horacio Arruda, Danielle McCann or Marguerite Blais in the dock. It is not to point fingers or to distribute blame.
Could that happen? May be. But we would still not be in the scenario of the Charbonneau commission, where several witnesses were accused of being in their pockets.
It seems to me that Quebeckers would know the difference between schemers and managers who acted in good faith to avoid an Italian disaster.
They saw the overflowing hospitals. They saw Italian caregivers faced with an impossible choice. Who to give the only remaining oxygen cylinder? Who to save, who to sacrifice?
They wanted to avoid that. They have offloaded the hospitals at full speed. They transferred hundreds of patients to CHSLDs. They prepared for the worst… without realizing it was the worst thing to do.
They escaped him. Totally. Tragically.
“The first wave still haunts us. We will never forget, ”Martin Koskinen, chief of staff to the Prime Minister, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
There is no reason to doubt it. We saw them. They were there day after day after day. Seven days on seven.
But the result is the same. Thousands of elders died in horrible, undignified, inhuman conditions.
It takes time to think. Collective and public. We have to understand how we got there. We owe it to the thousands of victims left to fend for themselves at the worst possible time – and their bereaved families.
We need a public commission of inquiry. Not to hold two or three managers to account, but to realize, collectively.
Realize how we treated vulnerable seniors in Quebec long before the pandemic. CHSLDs have not only been in the government’s blind spot. They’ve been in everyone’s blind spot. For decades.
We have to go to the end of things to admit, as a society, all that we have not done, all that we did not want to see.
Read the column “For a public inquiry” (Press) Read the column “An investigation for Gilbert” (Press)