Around the world and from Matane to Quebec City for new JHSB boss
Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
(This is Part One of a two-part feature)
Strange as it may seem, combating leprosy in the Amazon jungle, treating flood victims in Mozambique, helping desperate Syrian refugees in Greece and providing health services in the Far North were experiences that Mélie de Champlain says prepared her for her new job as head of Jeffery Hale -Saint Brigid’s care services.
De Champlain was hired in December 2023, and now that she’s settled into the job, she was happy to speak to the QCT about the extraordinary background that led her to Quebec City’s English-language health service hub and the challenges and opportunities the job presents.
The interview took place in de Champlain’s office on the second floor of the Jeffery Hale pavilion, adjacent to the hospital of the same name.
De Champlain’s official title is director of Jeffery Hale – Saint Brigid’s grouped institution of the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux (CIUSSS) de la Capitale Nationale.
Her path to a job in the upper strata of the Quebec government health bureaucracy was an unorthodox one but somehow destined for an ambitious, care-driven and world-wise young woman from Matane in the Gaspé region.
De Champlain said it was the influence of her father, the accountant at the Cégep de Matane, that opened her eyes to the world. “Dad was always talking to my brothers and sisters about the world. He’d always bring us newspapers and talk about the news of the world.”
In the same vein, he insisted the children learn English. De Champlain said she spent summers at an English camp in Nova Scotia and joked her English has a Nova Scotia accent.
Upon graduation from the local Cégep’s nursing school, de Champlain’s first job was at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, an experience she describes as “a real bath in anglophone culture and international culture at the same time.”
She earned advanced degrees in nursing at Université de Montréal and Université Laval, getting her master’s specializing in heart disease and infectious diseases.
She also did some volunteer work with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF – Doctors Without Borders) and attended a conference whose guest speaker was a humanitarian worker who had just returned from Angola. It was a fateful encounter.
The humanitarian was Vancouver native Michael Klobuchar; the two clicked, and in 1998 she headed off to join him in Brazil’s Amazon basin to work with a United Nations non-governmental agency combating leprosy.
Upon her return to Canada a year later, she found a public health job in another climatic extreme, in Puvirnituq, in Nunavik. After a few years working there, separated from Klobuchar, she decided to join him in working with MSF in hotspots around the world, including the war zone in Angola and epic flooding in Mozambique.
In 2001, pregnant with her first child, de Champlain and her husband returned to Canada, first to Vancouver, then moving to Toronto where she worked at the MSF office there.
De Champlain then made the switch from globe-trotting humanitarian work to health care administration in regional Quebec, taking a job with the health network in Matane – where her second child was born – and then later in nearby Amqui in the Matapedia Valley.
While in Amqui she completed a master’s degree in health management. She also discovered that “all this humanitarian work shaped me as a leader.”
The family then returned to Klobuchar’s home turf in B.C., where de Champlain, despite her doubts about getting a job in English, landed a major position with Vancouver Island emergency services.
“It was quite a leap,” she said, “being responsible for three major hospitals in Victoria and Nanaimo plus regional hospitals.”
In 2016, during the Syrian refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, she used her Christmas vacation time to fly to Greece to join in the humanitarian effort. Inspired by another B.C. woman, she contacted an NGO on the ground, crowd-sourced the trip and raised more for the relief effort.
Upon her arrival she found herself managing health care for refugees arriving in boats. “I was working on the beach on the island of Lesbos. When families arrived we would triage them and treat hypothermia.”
De Champlain said she has kept in touch with some of the refugees she cared for, and recently heard from one who had moved to Burlington, Ontario.
In 2018, de Champlain took a job with B.C. Coastal Health in Vancouver which lasted for five years – and then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. That set the stage for a fateful road trip that brought Mélie de Champlain to Quebec City and Jeffery Hale – Saint Brigid’s.
That story next week.