Author name: The Equity

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

Three representatives of the Municipality of Alleyn and Cawood traveled to Quebec City last week for the Federation of Quebec Municipalities conference, where they did not miss the opportunity to spread the word about their ongoing fight to change the way property evaluations are calculated. 

The municipality’s director general Isabelle Cardinal and councillors Sidney Squitti and Guy Bergeron met with several top politicians, including Minister of Municipal Affairs Andrée Laforest, to discuss what can be done to change what they believe to be a flawed evaluation system. They even introduced themselves to Quebec Premier François Legault. 

“We would like a review on the legislation for the calculation of municipal evaluations, to have it modernized and changed so there’s a better reflection of the activity on the real estate market right now,” Cardinal told THE EQUITY after returning from Quebec City.

“This evaluation law has been in effect since the 70s, so it is something we need to modernize, because right now we’ve seen the effect of COVID which had a real big impact on our real estate market.”

Last year, in year three of its triennial roll, the municipality was hit with a 370 per cent increase in its total municipal evaluation, due to the sale of a handful of empty lots sold for over three times their previously assessed value. 

While the municipality lowered its mill rate so that its residents weren’t paying taxes on what the municipality believed was an over-inflated value, this increase still jacked both the shares the municipality had to pay to the MRC Pontiac, as well as some of the other provincial taxes paid by ratepayers. 

Cardinal said that because Alleyn and Cawood did not want to increase the taxes it collected from residents, it had to cut its own services to meet its budgetary obligations to the MRC. 

In Quebec City, the municipality’s representatives, who back home have been working with a larger task force of residents to raise awareness about the issue, found their call for changes to the evaluation system to be well received. 

“We’ve seen a lot of openness from the ministry’s office, because now we’ll be working with an employee over there that will be looking at our situation,” Cardinal said. 

She said their call for change also seemed to resonate with other municipal officials from across the province.

“We’ve been hearing for a couple of months now that this is an Alleyn and Cawood problem, this is a one time thing,” she said. “But after talking with a lot of different municipalities, they didn’t get a comparative factor quite as high as us, but they lived something similar to us.”

The Alleyn and Cawood task force is also hoping the MRC Pontiac will change the way it calculates municipal shares so that general, and potentially inaccurate evaluations from year two and three of the triennial roll won’t be used to determine what a municipality should pay to the MRC. 

Cardinal and an accountant presented a new bylaw to the MRC’s mayors at their August plenary meeting. 

At the public council of mayors meeting in September, the MRC tabled a motion to begin the process of writing a new bylaw. 

The MRC’s director general Kim Lesage confirmed by email that now, before any new bylaw can be adopted, the MRC will have to present a new draft bylaw at a public meeting, and then at a following meeting it will be able to adopt said bylaw. 

THE EQUITY requested to speak with the MRC to better understand all it is considering when revising how best to calculate municipal shares, but the MRC did not offer an interview before the publication deadline. 

While Alleyn and Cawood’s total municipal evaluation came back down this fall, when it and 13 other MRC municipalities received their more in-depth year one property evaluations, Cardinal said it’s important the outdated system be changed so that other municipalities won’t be similarly pinched by inflated municipal assessments. 

“Now that people want to leave urban areas and come to our rural area, we’re going to see this more and more,” she said. “The sad thing is that it’s our locals who are paying the price on this.”

Cardinal noted five municipalities have just received their year two evaluations. 

“So they will be affected by the comparative factor if nothing is done before budget time,” she said.

“If they don’t want to be affected they just need to show support. If not, they can carry the bill, like we did.”

Cardinal said two years ago, the Municipality of Chichester requested the method of calculating municipal shares be revised, but nothing came of it.

“So we want to make sure that we will not be silenced. There is no urgency, but we don’t want the same thing to happen again. That’s for sure.” 

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

Outaouais’s health and social service provider, the Centre intégré de santé et des services sociaux de l’Outaouais (CISSSO), has launched a new initiative aimed at helping anglophones navigate hospitals and CLSCs that don’t have the official bilingual designation from the province’s Ministry of Health.

The new program, launched this month, is making yellow name tag holders available to staff who work in the region’s healthcare facilities – be they nurses, cooks, doctors or janitors – who wish to identify themselves as bilingual.

The idea, according to Joanne Dubois, CISSSO’s coordinator for accessing English services across the network, is to reduce anxiety for anglophones who need to travel to Hull or Gatineau for specialized services.

“If you’re an English family and you’re going to the city, look for an English card and they’ll help you,” Dubois said.

“My job is to ensure the person that speaks English anywhere in the Outaouais gets the service. And by doing this, it [makes it clear] that we’re allowed to get our services in our language.”

Dubois said she first got the idea for this yellow card system from her colleagues working in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, and figures since she launched the program on Sept. 6, at least 550 people have begun using the card system. The first, she noted with pride, was CISSSO’s president and CEO Marc Bilodeau.

Not needed in ‘designated’ bilingual hospitals, CLSCs

Dubois said the yellow card identifiers won’t be needed in hospitals and CLSCs that are considered “designated” bilingual institutions by the health ministry, which include the Pontiac Hospital, the Quyon, Chapeau, Mansfield, Otter Lake, Rapides des Joachims, and Shawville CLSCs, and the Shawville long-term care home.

Healthcare providers in these institutions, according to the ministry’s website, are required “to make all their health and social services accessible in the English language to English-speaking persons.”

According to Dubois, this means staff in these facilities can communicate with each other in English, health files can be in English, and all signage and written communications on social media must be in both English and French.

Dubois noted, though, that the bilingual designation has no impact on a patient’s ability to communicate with their healthcare provider in English – that English speaking patients in the province will be able to speak with their providers in English, no matter what kind of hospital they’re in.

“There’s no language when it comes to your health,” she said, noting this applies for anglophones traveling to Gatineau and Hull for specialized services.

CAQ English-access healthcare directive clarified following criticism

Pontiac MNA André Fortin said he believes a piece of legislation tabled by the CAQ government in July, which on Monday was clarified by another directive, caused significant confusion around this fundamental healthcare maxim articulated by Dubois.

According to reporting from the Montreal Gazette, a 31-page Bill 96 directive produced in July stated only “recognized anglophones”, defined as people who had an English-language education certificate, or people who had communicated solely in English prior to May 2021, would be entitled to continue communicating in English with health and social service networks.

“Our main worry at this point in time was to ensure that the interpretation of the directives flowing from Bill 96 did not give the impression to any healthcare worker across the province that they could no longer serve english-speaking Quebecers in English,” Fortin told THE EQUITY.

Earlier this month, he tabled a motion in the Nationally Assembly ensuring no English-language education certificate would be needed for anglophone Quebecers to access health care in their mother tongue. The motion was unanimously adopted.

“We wanted to make sure that everybody was on the same page here: that patients knew they had a right to services in English, and that those providing the services didn’t interpret [the directives] the wrong way,” Fortin said.

“Because that’s the real risk here, is that some healthcare providers will interpret it to say that they can’t provide services in English or that they would have to verify one’s eligibility.”

Fortin said the CAQ government also agreed to send the motion to all healthcare establishments across Quebec so that “it was immediately said to healthcare workers that, ‘No, you can and you should treat people in the language of their choice’.”

Now, this may not be needed. On Monday of this week (Sept. 23), the government released a new directive which clarified that “no validation of the user’s identity is required to access these services in English,” according to reporting from CBC Montreal.

A two-page English summary of the new directive states that “health and social services may be offered in a language other than French, upon request, when the health of any person so requires.”

The full 10-page directive is available only in French.

In an email written in French to THE EQUITY, Quebec’s Ministry of Health said the Bill 96 directive would never have affected designated bilingual institutions, and was put in place in July to to “equip establishments in the health and social services network to apply the new provisions of the Charter of the French Language in force since 1 June 2023, which stipulate that the public administration must use French exclusively in its written and oral communications, except in certain exceptional situations.”

Update: Sept. 24, 2024 This article, as published in the newspaper on Sept. 25, reported the province had yet to change its original 31-page directive put forward in July. THE EQUITY learned, after the newspaper was sent to print, that on Monday the Ministry of Health did indeed release an updated directive. This online article has been edited to reflect this development.

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

On Tuesday evening the MRC Pontiac presented the latest version of its plan for developing the agricultural industry in the Pontiac at a public consultation meeting hosted at the new market building in Chapeau. 

The plan is referred to as a PDZA, a planning model created by the province’s Ministry of Agriculture to be used to guide development of agricultural zones in the province.

On Tuesday, the MRC put forward six priority areas to focus its development efforts over the next five to 10 years, these based on information gathered from a series of public consultations done over the past year. 

“[The consultations were] really trying to get a true on-the-ground assessment of what the needs are for agriculture in the Pontiac,” said Shanna Armstrong, the MRC’s economic development commissioner for agriculture. 

The six priority areas that arose from these consultations are strengthening the region’s attractiveness for new farmers; making agricultural services such as veterinarians and agronomists easier to access for producers by way of a regional service hub; developing the Agrisaveur food transformation center along with the abattoir in Shawville; educating the public about the value of having a local agricultural industry and about what it looks like to pursue a career in agriculture; marketing local agricultural products to promote agritourism; and helping to connect producers with existing resources to help them transition towards more environmentally sustainable practices. 

Armstrong said naming these priorities in an official plan enables the MRC to seek funding to implement its vision. 

“It’s important to have [the plan] large enough that you can implement things that come up along the way, but also having them specific enough that they’re actually useful for producers that are trying to just farm and run their businesses successfully,” she added, and said feedback on Tuesday evening was overall positive, with some suggestions made as to more relevant timelines, or important partners to bring on board in certain projects. 

“The goal was to capture everyone’s feedback to make sure these are really the projects that are truly going to help producers,” Armstrong said, noting Tuesday’s event was the final public forum in the development of the PDZA.

“The goal is that the final plan be presented to council at the end of this year, hopefully for adoption, and then we can start implementing, which is to me the exciting part.” 

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

Union says four of six Pontiac techs still plan to leave

Quebec’s treasury board confirmed last week it will not be awarding equal bonuses to radiology technologists working in Pontiac, Wakefield and Maniwaki hospitals as it is offering to those in Hull, Gatineau and Papineau hospitals.

The news came on Thursday from the union representing radiology technologists in the Outaouais, the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS).

“The treasury board has said there will be no increase in the bonuses,” APTS Outaouais president Guylaine Laroche told THE EQUITY in a French interview, explaining the union had received the decision from the province that day. “We’re excessively disappointed by the answer but we remain available for negotiations.”

This summer five of the six full-time technologists working at the Pontiac Hospital applied for positions in Gatineau and Ontario when the Quebec government omitted them from its offer of a $22,000 bonus to technologists in Gatineau hospitals.

When it became clear many of the rural technologists were making plans to take jobs in Gatineau to get the bonus, the health ministry offered $18,000 bonuses to those in Pontiac, Wakefield and Maniwaki, an attempt to incentivize them to stay put.

But soon after that announcement, APTS confirmed the five Pontiac employees who had applied elsewhere still intended to follow through on their move.

Last month, Nicole Boucher-Larivière, director of CISSSO’s Pontiac service network, told THE EQUITY the government was still in negotiations with the union and that she was optimistic it would come around to awarding the full $22,000 to all radiology technologists across the Outaouais.

“We’re confident the discussions are going well so I’m still hoping they’re going to be able to resolve the difference,” Boucher-Larivière said at the time, adding she believes some of the technologists were waiting on the outcome of those negotiations before they make their final decision.

Boucher-Lariviére cancelled THE EQUITY’s scheduled interview on this matter following Thursday’s news.

On Tuesday last week, Minister of Health Christian Dubé visited the Pontiac Hospital and met with the technologists working there, a sign for many, including Laroche, that positive news might be coming.

“He went to meet with the technologists of Pontiac and Maniwaki, and we had hope that this meeting might influence the decision favourably, but unfortunately that was not the case,” Laroche said.

She said the treasury board didn’t give the union a reason as to why equal bonuses wouldn’t be offered to all technologists.

“What we are reading between the lines is that they don’t think the technologists are going to move to the urban hospitals,” she said.

Pontiac not heard, MNA says

In a post to X, formally known as Twitter, Minister Dubé said his visit to the Outaouais was one of “hearing the preoccupations of Outaouais partners,” but Pontiac MNA André Fortin, who met with the minister during his visit to the hospital on Tuesday, said Thursday’s decision leads him to believe Pontiac’s needs were not in fact heard.

“The very first thing he was told to do was equalize the bonuses in order to stabilize the teams and services available at the Shawville hospital and three days later his ministry turns around and denies that,” Fortin said.

“By refusing to offer the same bonuses across the region, he is pushing people to work in the city, and to the detriment of services here in the Pontiac.”

At a rally organized by local activism group Citizens of the Pontiac outside the Pontiac Hospital on Monday to protest the government’s decision, Laroche said four of the six full-time technologists in the Pontiac were still planning to leave for jobs that started Sept. 9, but that one applicant had changed their mind and now plans to stay in the Pontiac.

This leaves two full-time technologists and one part-time technologist to serve Pontiac residents, as well as those who come from the city to benefit from shorter wait times.

“Two point five workers to cover seven days a week, 365 days a year, day and night, it’s impossible to cover all of the work,” Laroche said, explaining the loss of four technologists – those responsible for running the machines that produce images interpreted by radiologists – would cause serious delays in critical services at the hospital across multiple departments.

She said the technologists’ collective agreement permits the employer, in emergency cases, to temporarily relocate employees to serve regions where there is a major break in services, only if no employees volunteer to relocate. She said it is usually the least senior employees who are relocated in these cases.

At the Monday rally about a dozen residents gathered with brightly coloured signs carrying messages demanding equal treatment of Pontiac’s technologists.

Citizens of the Pontiac spokesperson and organizer of the event Judith Spence said she still has hope the government might change its mind.

“To this date [the union] doesn’t have anything in writing. Until the paperwork is done, until it comes out officially . . . this is why we’re here. We want it to be heard and known that we care,” Spence said, noting she hopes the rally will get the attention of the decision makers in Quebec City.

“If you think you can just walk over the Pontiac, you’re totally wrong.”

Citizens of the Pontiac had previously organized a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the technologists, but has since dismantled this as there is no way for the group to legally transfer the money raised to the people it was supposed to support.

Spence said unless she can find a way to get the $4,000 raised thus far to the technologists in the next week, the money will be returned to the donors.

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Outaouais’ health and social service provider (CISSSO) has said none of the five Pontiac imaging technicians who have been offered higher paying positions in Gatineau and Papineau have confirmed with CISSSO they are in fact leaving their jobs.

“The plans are not definitive, it’s something they’re considering, but nothing is confirmed from any of the five,” the healthcare network’s Pontiac director Nicole Boucher-Larivière told THE EQUITY.

She said negotiations between their union, the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS) and the provincial government are still ongoing.

“We’re confident the discussions are going well so I’m still hoping they’re going to be able to resolve the difference,” Boucher-Larivière said, adding she believes some of the technicians are waiting on the outcome of those negotiations before they make their final decision.

“I’m not minimizing, there is a real risk. But right now we’re still at a waiting phase where we’re waiting to see what will come out of the negotiations that are still going on provincially.”

Meanwhile, Guylaine Laroche, president of the APTS’ Outaouais chapter, says the union has not heard from the government on the subject of extending full bonuses to all radiology technicians since representatives met with Quebec’s Deputy Minister of Health Richard Deschamps on July 25.

She said in that meeting, the union was clear that if hospitals in Maniwaki and Shawville are left with only one full-time imaging technician, the safety of patients in these communities would be at stake.

Laroche said the union also highlighted the fact that Pontiac radiology services help to slim waitlists in Hull and Gatineau, so a loss of technicians in this region will also affect services in the urban centres.

“We felt we had been heard, and they promised us a quick return on the matter,” Laroche told THE EQUITY in French.

She said the union was supposed to meet with the province again two weeks ago but the meeting was cancelled and the union hasn’t heard from the province on this matter since.

“We remain available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for negotiations, but for the moment, we’re waiting to hear back from the government,” Laroche said.

CISSSO considering contingency plans

Boucher-Larivière said the healthcare network is looking into how it would address various scenarios depending on how many of the six full-time technicians currently working at the hospital decide to leave.

“In the past we have been down as low as three [technicians at the hospital] and we were able to keep essential services going,” she said. “The worst outcome for the population would be having to wait a little bit longer for some imaging testing that’s not considered urgent.”

Boucher-Larivière explained that in the past, the network has addressed technician shortages by putting more of the staff members on call, rather than having them show up to regular shifts, to ensure there is always somebody available to respond to an emergency situation.

“But sometimes we have to reduce the amount of hours they’re actually at work so that would mean having to wait a little bit longer for tests that are not mandatory,” she said, adding CISSSO would also try to seek support from technicians working elsewhere in the Outaouais who could fill vacancies in the Pontiac until the hospital finds more permanent staff.

“Nobody wants to dictate anybody, because we want them to have a good quality of life, but if it comes down to essential services being at risk, sometimes we do move people around to assure safety, but that’s usually a very last resort,” she said.

Regarding finding long-term solutions to the chronic staffing shortages in the Pontiac, Boucher-Larivière said a provincial table has been put in place, the members of which will meet throughout the fall to examine how to support better working conditions in the Outaouais’ healthcare services, given the competition the region faces with Ontario.

She said at this table, CISSSO is advocating for healthcare workers in the Outaouais to receive salaries that are on par with those in Ontario.

“We want to see what the discrepancy really is, we want to get the right numbers, so that we can negotiate and maybe we can get special status for the Outaouais, so it is a top priority for us,” she said.

“So now we’re trying to get the imaging situation sorted out but the work that’s being done is going to go far beyond that.”

Union agrees to “flying squad” technicians to relieve looming exodus

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Judith Spence is the spokesperson for Citizens of the Pontiac, a group of residents who on Friday launched a campaign to raise money to entice Pontiac’s medical imaging technicians to continue working in this region for another year rather than taking higher paying positions elsewhere.

A local activism group is hoping to raise $30,000 as soon as possible to pay Pontiac’s six full-time medical imaging technicians to stay in their jobs for another year instead of leaving for higher paying positions elsewhere. Citizens of the Pontiac has launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise $5,000 for each technician – an amount that would more than equalize the discrepancy between the $22,000 bonus the Quebec government offered to technician positions in Hull, Gatineau and Papineau, and the $18,000 bonus it offered to those in Maniwaki, Wakefield and Pontiac.

The group’s hope is that this additional $5,000 would be enough to convince five of the technicians who, according to their union (APTS), are on track to leave their positions in the Pontiac by Sept. 9, to stay in these positions for another year. “I’ve heard that five out of six are going. That’s going to shut the hospital down. That’s going to turn into a doctor’s office or a CLSC, and that’s basically not the function of a hospital,” said Citizens of the Pontiac spokesperson Judith Spence, explaining the drive behind the fundraiser. “We don’t want to lose people for four grand a piece.”

Spence and three other members – Myles Jones, Amanda Brewster, and Nikki Buechler – have formed what she calls a steering committee responsible for organizing the fundraiser and ensuring the money is managed according to group policies. “You don’t get a lump sum ahead of time,” Spence said, explaining how the money would be distributed to the technicians if the desired sum is raised. “You work, and every month you get a stipend.”

Spence said if the province does decide to pay Pontiac technicians the $22,000, the money raised will be returned to the donors, with the exception of the small percentage claimed by GoFundMe. “We’ve always had to fight for basics,” she said, emphasizing this campaign is in no way political. “This is just, ‘You’re my neighbour and I don’t want you to go.’”

Spence has spent many years in community organizing and activism. She worked as a representative for her nurses union, as well as the president of the Environmental Illness Society of Canada, which lobbied the federal government to recognize multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome. “Government people do pay attention when people are sharing their voice and getting attention,” Spence said. “They will pay attention. Will they change? I believe they will.”

By the time this newspaper went to print, the campaign had raised $2,150. Those wishing to contribute can search ‘Keep our Radiology Technicians here with us in Shawville!’ in Google to find the campaign page.

Union agrees to ‘flying squad’ technicians

On Thursday, APTS signed a new agreement with the government that will enable its technicians to join the province’s recently created ‘flying squad’ of healthcare workers who can be deployed to regions in need across the province to offer immediate relief of staffing shortages. THE EQUITY was unable to reach a union representative for comment on the most recent development before publication deadline, but based on a French press release, it appears union members will receive a lump-sum payment of $100 per working day if they volunteer to work in regions other than their own.

This appears to be the latest in the union’s agreements with the Quebec government intended to address the shortage of technicians across the Outaouais healthcare network. This spring the union agreed for the Quebec government to offer $22,000 bonuses to imaging technician positions in Papineau, Hull, and Gatineau hospitals in an attempt to keep technicians employed there from moving to higher-paying jobs in Ontario. The union later agreed for those working in Maniwaki, Wakefield, and Pontiac hospitals, originally excluded from these bonuses, to be offered $18,000 bonuses, in an effort to incentivize them to stay in their positions rather than seeking the higher bonuses in urban hospitals.

But last month, APTS said five of the six full-time technicians working in both the hospital in Shawville and the CLSC in Mansfield were still planning to leave their positions even though they had been offered bonuses. The union said last week it is continuing to pressure the province to extend the higher bonuses to all technicians, but this has not happened yet.

Not first community fundraiser for imaging services

Josey Bouchard, founder of local healthcare advocacy group Pontiac Voice, said she is frustrated the government’s management of the staffing shortage has pushed some in the Pontiac community to try to raise the bonus shortfall themselves. “I find it amazing that they’re doing it, and appalling that they have to do that,” Bouchard said. “I hope it relates to them that the community wants their services close by […] It’s appalling that we have to go to this extreme, for the government to wake up.”

She noted this isn’t the first time residents of the region have organized themselves to raise money to support local radiology services, pointing to the $800,000 the community raised in the late ’90s to purchase the hospital’s first CT scan. At the time, Dr. Thomas O’Neill was president of the Pontiac Hospital Foundation, which was spearheading a plan to attract doctors to the region, and so he was very involved in the fundraising efforts. “So we identified [purchasing a CT scan] as something that would be necessary to attract and keep doctors in the area,” Dr. O’Neill said. “The initial goal was to raise $700,000 which we did in a remarkable period of two and a half years, and that was from one of the poorest communities in Quebec.”

He said while he saw that fundraising effort as, at its core, a community proving it was committed enough to its healthcare to raise the needed money, he sees the current fundraising effort underway in a slightly different light. “When you’re looking at this GoFundMe, I really appreciate the people that are doing this, it’s coming from their heart […], but the problem is the real attention needs to be focused on the political aspect because it’s unfair,” Dr. O’Neill said. “It’s the country areas that produce the food, produce the hydro, produce everything. They should, at least, be entitled to basic medical care.”

Dr. O’Neill, who now works as a family doctor at the Lotus Clinic, has spent many decades working at the Pontiac Hospital, as chief of anesthesia and of the department of general medicine, as a doctor in the emergency room, and delivering babies in the now-dissolved obstetrics unit. He said losing five of six technicians – those responsible for running the machines that produce images interpreted by radiologists – would effectively mean the gradual death of the most services offered at the hospital.

“If you lose your technicians, and the surgeons can’t do their jobs, and you can’t run the ICU, you get a cascading effect of the deterioration of the institution,” he said. “You cannot run this hospital at the moment unless you have the diagnostic tools to do it. Part of those tools are having x-ray technicians who will actually run the equipment.”