By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Advocates for the shelved Bedford CHSLD expansion project are hopeful that a packed-out public meeting, an open letter in local media and intervention by the Official Opposition might persuade the CIUSSS de l’Estrie–CHUS to reconsider its plans.
Last month, the CIUSSS announced that it was cancelling the $15-million expansion due to a lack of demand, choosing instead to carry out some minor renovations and upgrades in collaboration with the community. However, the Bedford Pole Health Committee hasn’t given up. On June 17, the group held a public meeting at the Centre Georges-Perron that drew a larger-than-expected crowd, and since then, the group has been gathering signatures on a petition calling for the expansion to go ahead, and actively looking for seniors who are living in other CHSLDs and would prefer to move to Bedford.
“For the moment, we have not heard anything new [from the CIUSSS]. We are doing everything we can with the petition and looking for [seniors] who are elsewhere and want to move back to Bedford,” said Pierrette Messier-Peet of the Bedford Pole Health Committee. Messier-Peet also said Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest and the Quebec Liberal Party had been contacted about the petition; Charest has repeatedly said she doesn’t want to give up on the project, and reiterated that to the BCN through a spokesperson.
Open letter
Former Bedford resident Pierre Lévesque, 90, the father of Fondation Lévesque-Craighead cofounder Yves Lévesque, took the initiative to write an open letter to Health Minister Christian Dubé calling on the government to reconsider. “I thought I had to let him know what was going on,” the elder Lévesque, who now lives in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, told the BCN. “Under [former Liberal health minister Gaétan] Barrette, we had a $4-million project to convert the single rooms into double rooms, but nothing ever came of that. There have been a lot of conversations, but there haven’t been any real repairs there for 30 years. We were dreaming of this [expansion project] for years, there has been a lot invested in it and now it’s cancelled overnight.”
The CIUSSS cited lack of demand as a reason for taking the expansion project off the table, but Lévesque, a retired businessman, said he knew seniors who had been placed in homes elsewhere in the region who were hoping for an opportunity to move back to Bedford. “They say they have no waiting list, but I can name three, four, five people who would be on it. There are people I used to work with who are displaced…who cry every day, whose sisters and brothers never come to visit,” he said. He added that in light of the aging population, he expected demand for places at the home to rise within the next four to five years.
“It was a shock to hear the project was cancelled…but people in the community are not going to drop the ball on this,” Lévesque said.
“CHSLDs are a necessary living environment for our seniors and I applaud the mobilization of the community,” seniors’ affairs minister Sonia Bélanger said in a brief written response. “The decision to expand the Bedford CHSLD has been revised by the CIUSSS, in part because the cost of the project has changed, as has the population, resulting in a reduced need for housing. Nevertheless, I expect the CIUSSS to carry out the necessary renovations and ensure that the needs of the region’s seniors are met. I remain in close contact with [Brome-Missisquoi MNA] Isabelle Charest, and we are following this issue very closely.”