LJI reporter

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.”

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Ethan Paulin is a huge fan of Taylor Swift. At 14 years old, he loves all music, but Taylor Swift, at this moment, is his everything.
“I’ve liked her for most of my life, but only became a big fan in 2022,” Paulin explained. “Her songs are really good, and a lot of them are really poetic. And I just also love her voice.”
He loves her so much, in fact, that he’s working a full-time summer job at the Jardin éducatif du Pontiac to save the money he needs to buy a ticket to the last show on her Eras tour, scheduled for Vancouver this December.
Paulin loves to sing, and write songs, often sad songs.
“I find it’s a fun way to get sadness out. I wake up in the middle of the night and I have an idea, and I just write.”
But it’s not often he shares his songs in public. He said his mental health sometimes prevents him from sharing his creations, and pursuing his passion for singing.
“It’s not good, but I’m getting better at controlling it,” he said. “It’s not going away, that’s for sure. But I can help myself control it.”
Part of this work overcoming his mental health challenges involves intentionally putting himself in situations that make him uncomfortable.
This spring Paulin played a central role in Pontiac High School’s rendition of In the Heights, and even performed a solo on stage. He also took a job at Quyon’s Clarendon Café on weekends, which forces him to interact with people he doesn’t know.
But the latest in these personal challenges is signing up to spend five days a week, all summer long, learning to grow vegetables with a group of teenagers he has never met.
Weeding? “It’s horrible,” he says. Socializing with strangers? He’s not a fan of that either. But he’s warming up to both.
This summer he is one of 23 Pontiac youth who have decided to tackle their mental health challenges head on through Jardin éducatif’s first youth summer job program.
Jardin éducatif du Pontiac is a non-profit organization in Campbell’s Bay that runs vegetable farming programs for at-risk youth as a way to teach them critical life skills.
For many years it ran summer camps for youth that had been referred to the organization by social service workers.
“This year we did it a bit different. We decided to give minimum wage to all youth that come,” explained Martin Riopel, the organization’s director general. “Why we have decided to try this pilot project is because we have seen that a lot of the youth that have been referred by social services, they don’t want to be here.”
Hiring the youth as summer employees, rather than simply accepting them on the basis of referral, offered new possibilities for engaging youth in the programming.
“The idea behind the kids applying is to put the responsibility in the hands of the youth,” Riopel said. “We wanted the youth to try the process of getting a job.”
About half of the youth hired this year were still referred by a social worker, but the difference is that in order to be accepted into the program, they had to express their desire to participate.
“They need to have a personal goal, so something they can work on individually, something that could help them as a human,” explained Mélissa Langevin, head gardener and youth worker with the organization. “So that was the first thing we were asking for [when hiring], because if the goal of being here was just money, well then that’s not a good fit for us.”
In this pilot year of the summer job program, Jardin éducatif received 50 applications from youth across the Pontiac. After interviewing every single applicant, the team hired 23 youth, seven more than they had originally planned for.
“Still it was really hard, because if we could we would hire them all,” Langevin said.
The youth spend four days a week in the garden, doing everything from planting and weeding to, starting this week, harvesting the produce they’ve grown to sell at market stalls.
On Tuesdays, they can be found in Fort Coulonge at the corner of rue Baume and rue Principale, on Thursdays outside the CHSLD at the Shawville hospital, and both days at the kiosk at the garden in Campbell’s Bay.
Each of the youth chosen for the program have identified something personal they are hoping to work on over the course of their employment. For some, it’s social anxiety. For others, it’s an eating disorder, or self-harm.
Over the course of the summer job, they will participate in a wide variety of programming designed to support them and help them achieve these personal goals.
This includes skills-building workshops from service providers across the Pontiac, including cooking workshops that teach them to transform the vegetables they are growing into full meals, as well as workshops that offer guidance on everything from building healthy relationships to budgeting to addictions prevention.
On top of all this, Jardin éducatif youth workers meet one-on-one with each youth consistently throughout the summer to check in on how they’re doing, both in the program and at home.
“We have a lot of kids having different kinds of issues that they need to work on,” Langevin said.
Last Wednesday morning, before the heavy rains began, the young gardeners were out in the field, sitting in the dirt, weeding the beds of vegetables.
Fifteen-year-old Campbell’s Bay resident Cameron Crawford had his ear phones in as he plucked weeds from a patch of cucumbers.
“It’s not too hard, it’s not too easy, it’s kind of perfect for what I was looking for,” he said. “Normally we do a lot of weeding throughout the week. Sometimes I help cut the grass, and whipper snip and all that.”
Crawford, who has been working on a dairy farm for three years, said he applied for the job because he wanted to improve on his work ethic.
“I feel I’m getting more used to getting up and getting to work at the time that I’m supposed to,” he said. “And I’m more active during the day rather than sitting at a desk. It’s a lot better.”
A few rows away, Teagan Dutson and Kyanna Beauchamp were working together to tackle the weeds in another bed.
Both Dutson and Beauchamp grew up in Quyon, but Dutson attended the English elementary school, while Beauchamp attended the French one, and so the two never crossed paths.
They’ve found, however, that they have a lot in common when it comes to their respective mental health challenges.
“Here, you get to talk to people, and the person I talk to, she really understands me and what I’m going through,” Dutson said. “It’s really calming.”
“It’s really calming and people here don’t judge,” Beauchamp agreed. “My therapist at school told me to apply here because it would help me, and it really does help.”
Beauchamp said a big thing she thinks she’ll take away from her time at Jardin éducatif is the experience of getting support after asking for it.
“I asked for help and I got it. I’m not alone in this,” she said. “I was always scared to ask for help. I thought I would get rejected or laughed at. So I won’t be scared another time if I need to.”
Once it started to rain, the group migrated from the garden to the covered picnic tables. Alex Belair, Kaydan Lévesque and his brother Rylan gathered around some snacks at one table.
Like Paulin, both Belair and Lévesque applied for the job with the ambition to work on their social skills.
“I wanted to get better at talking to people, while also getting my hands dirty and getting out of the house,” Belair said.
No matter what the youth want to work on, the staff at the garden are there to help them, even when they might not realize they need it.
Eden Beimers is one of these staff members.
“When I see a kid a little bit off, oftentimes I’ll pull them away and have a chat. Because sometimes that’s what they want, but they don’t know how to ask for it. As a kid, I didn’t know how to ask to talk to somebody.”
She said, laughing, that the youth have often accused her of being too nosey. But she makes it clear they can tell her they don’t want to talk if they’re not interested. This, she finds, rarely happens.
“I always wanted to become the person I needed when I was a kid,” Beimers said. “I needed somebody who was easy to talk to and understood I wasn’t going to be good one hundred per cent of the time, and understood that when I do screw up, it doesn’t define who I am.”
Now 22, she’s found a job that allows her to be the support for others that she needed as a teenager.
“There are a lot of things that some people think are taboo to talk about, but the more I’m in this position, the more I’m realizing how many kids confide the same thing in me, and how many people are similar.”
The funding used to finance this pilot project is not guaranteed to be renewed in years to come, but the Jardin éducatif team is determined to find ways to continue to motivate youth to work at the garden.
“It’s the beginning of something because we would like to have a full program all year long with gardening, cooking, and selling the veggies,” Langevin said, explaining that the vision is that this could be run through the schools, and that youth could get credit for it.
“It will probably be a smaller group in the next years, but we want to try to continue this kind of thing, because we think it could be a good program for the kids who really don’t like school.”

News follows exclusion of staff at Pontiac, Wakefield hospitals from Outaouais bonuses

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Four of the six full-time medical imaging technicians working in the Pontiac have applied to better paying jobs in Gatineau, while a fifth has possibly applied to a position in Ontario, a spokesperson for Outaouais’ healthcare network (CISSSO) confirmed in an email to THE EQUITY on Monday afternoon.
The news of these potential departures comes less than a week after the Quebec government extended bonuses and temporarily higher salaries to medical imaging staff in Maniwaki and Papineau hospitals, but not to those in Shawville and Wakefield hospitals, or the CLSC in Saint-André-Avellin.
The temporary financial incentives were first offered only to technicians at Hull and Gatineau hospitals in an effort to entice them to stay in their jobs rather than take higher paying positions in Ontario, but the technicians left anyway.
Meanwhile, elected officials in Outaouais’ rural communities expressed concern this policy would cause an exodus of technicians to the region’s urban hospitals where the pay was better, so the CAQ government extended these financial incentives to only two of four rural hospitals.
The decision sparked outrage in the Pontiac when it was announced last week. Politicians and healthcare workers warned the second exclusion would only intensify the competition the Pontiac Hospital faces when it comes to retaining staff.
At a press conference outside the Pontiac Hospital on Thursday, Pontiac MNA André Fortin echoed this fear.
“They’re in the process of repeating exactly the same mistake they made last month,” Fortin, also health critic for the official opposition, told reporters in French, accusing the CAQ government of failing to recognize the particular needs of the Pontiac region.
He noted one of Pontiac’s technicians lives in Aylmer, while another lives in Chapeau, and that they now both have higher paying positions much closer to their homes.
“It’s almost like they want to lose workers, and then react, and then justify the increase,” Fortin said. “They’re doing things backwards. It would be so much easier to fix it now, before people take the hard decision to leave.”
Fortin said extending the financial incentives to workers at the Pontiac Hospital would cost about $150,000.
“To a government, that’s nothing.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s only taken three days and this is already the movement, as expected,” MRC Pontiac warden Jane Toller told THE EQUITY Monday evening.
“I think that when people are not treated fairly [ . . . ] there’s no good reason why they should have to feel loyal any longer. We need to have the bonuses given before anybody leaves, because once they leave, we’re not going to be able to get them back.”
The Pontiac region shares six full-time imaging technicians between the Pontiac Hospital and the CLSC in Fort Coulonge, and two retired technicians help out part-time. Together, they are responsible for x-rays, ultrasounds, and other forms of medical imaging critical to most healthcare treatment.
If the five technicians succeed in their applications, the Pontiac region would be left with a single full-time staff member.
Toller and the region’s other wardens had two meetings with Minister of Health Christian Dubé in the week prior to the expansion of the bonuses and following both of them, she said she was assured by the minister that bonuses would be extended to all of the Outaouais.
She called last week’s agreement a “slap in the face.”
“Because we have loyal employees [ . . . ] I think at the last minute [the goverment] decided, ‘Oh, it’s not as much of a crisis,’ and their solution is they’re going to monitor the situation,” Toller said. “Well, this is unacceptable. We are not going to stand here and watch a crisis result.”
This Monday, the Outaouais’ four wardens and the newly elected mayor of Gatineau published an open letter demanding the Quebec government “offer fair and equitable bonuses to all medical imaging technologists in the Outaouais region.”
Toller said the MRC will also move a resolution to the same effect at its monthly Council of Mayors meeting this Wednesday, June 19.
THE EQUITY asked the health ministry for clarity on why the bonuses were extended to some hospitals and not others, but did not receive a response before publication deadline.
However, in a recent article from Le Droit, Minister responsible for the Outaouais, Mathieu Lacombe, suggested the exclusion had something to do with a hospital’s distance from Ottawa.

“The further away we are from Ottawa, the less temptation there is for employees,” he said in French. “Consequently, in Hull, Gatineau and Buckingham, we had to have a bonus that reached a maximum level.”
A ‘temporary’ and ‘incomplete’ fix
Under the new, two-year agreement announced last week, technicians at the Papineau Hospital will receive a $22,000 bonus and those in Maniwaki will receive an $18,000 bonus.
All technicians at those hospitals will also receive a 10 per cent salary increase for the summer period, granted staff commit to working an additional 2.5 hours every week.
Guylaine Laroche is the Outaouais president of l’Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS), the union representing imaging technicians in the region.
“The agreement we have now is a step in the right direction but it is clearly not sufficient,” she said in French.
She warned of the significant risk that technicians who weren’t offered bonuses move to hospitals where the bonuses are in place.
But she also said the temporary measures are insufficient in addressing the larger staffing shortage that has been plaguing the Outaouais’ healthcare network for years, both because they are temporary, and don’t include all radiology workers in the region.
Fortin also took issue with the premise of offering a bonus as a solution to the network-wide staffing shortages.
“It’s temporary, it’s incomplete, it’s not a measure that is efficient. What we need are salaries that are on par with Ontario,” he said.
Statistics provided by CISSSO show that the number of radiology technicians employed by the healthcare organization dropped from 122 in 2019 to 102 in 2024. Over the same time period, the number of nurses working for CISSSO dropped from 1984 to 1827 across the organization.
“This has been happening for a decade now, but now, we need to stop that,” said Jean Pigeon, spokesperson for recently formed healthcare advocacy group SOS Outaouais, at a second press conference at the Pontiac Hospital on Friday morning.
“We need to have permanent measures. We need to stop the flow of our healthcare staff that are moving away.”
The press conference, organized by local healthcare advocacy group Pontiac Voice, was attended by several leaders from Pontiac’s health network, including Pontiac Voice representative Josey Bouchard, Jennifer Larose, president of the CISSSO user committee and Anne Amyotte, president of the CLSC foundation.
Also in attendance was Sophie Pieshke, a radiologist currently on maternity leave. She worked at the Pontiac Hospital 10 years ago, and built her home in Shawville with the hope of returning to work at the hospital once her leave is up.
But on Friday she said she may have to reconsider.
“As much as my heart is at this hospital, my profession is medical imaging technician. I love my work, but with these working conditions, I have to ask myself what I’m going to do. Do I return to this hospital, or do I want to go somewhere else,” Pieshke said in French.