LJI reporter

Five biodiversity hotspots already identified for protection in the Pontiac

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

A new Indigenous-led conservation initiative in the Outaouais is working to protect 30 per cent of the region’s land and freshwater ecosystems by the year 2030.

Leaders from Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation’s natural resources and wildlife office will be working to bring together different levels of government with local environmental organizations to create a roadmap for how, and where, to create conservation areas to best protect the biodiversity across the First Nation’s traditional territory.

Currently, about 10 per cent of land in the Outaouais is protected, 7 per cent less than the global total. To meet its target, the project needs to triple the amount of protected land in this region.

This goal is in line with the 30 by 30 commitment made globally by 200 countries, including Canada, at the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal. Quebec’s Ministry of Environment committed to this target a year earlier.

Jonathan Cote is the coordinator for Kitigan Zibi’s Land Guardians program, and the spokesperson for this project.

“It’s to not sit back and wait for the government or NGOs to start the process. It’s saying, ‘Well, we have a table that we can all sit at so let’s all come together and sit at the same table,’” Cote said.

The First Nation’s Land Guardians will guide the field studies being done to understand what biodiversity exists in the region and will offer a leading voice in discussions around how to protect it.
“As Guardians we provide the technical support these projects need,” Cote said. “We’re in the middle of building more capacity to hire more guardians that can go out onto the land and share the traditional knowledge aspect of it as well.”

Cote explained the project’s name – Kidjìmàniàn – means “our canoe”, and can be translated as “paddling the same canoe,” a name fitting for a project that requires a high degree of teamwork and strategizing to reach a target now just over five years away.

“If we look at our region in the Outaouais it’s very populated. There’s a lot of private property, so that’s why it’s important to get everybody at the table,” he said.

Many of the key players who will need to be at the table for this target to be attained gathered in Kitigan Zibi to launch the project on Oct. 17. The group was also celebrating the awarding of $2 million by Environment and Climate Change Canada to the project, financial support for the first phase of the initiative secured by Pontiac-Kitigan Zibi MP Sophie Chatel.

In attendance was Pontiac warden Jane Toller, representing the MRC Pontiac, one of the five MRCs that will be partners in this initiative.

“The reason I’m excited about this project is that I think it’s very important for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to work together,” Toller said. “We can learn a lot about protecting the land from them because they are the keepers of the Earth, so to work together on this, I find it very exciting.”
The first phase of the project will involve community consultations and education sessions to bring the public on board with the project’s goals, completing an in-depth biodiversity assessment to identify which areas need to be conserved, and designing a plan to conserve the chosen areas.

Five Pontiac locations already earmarked for conservation

Some of this work is already well underway. Warden Toller said the MRC’s council of mayors received a presentation from Erik Higgins, the manager of Kitigan Zibi’s natural resources and wildlife office, at a recent plenary meeting.

Higgins said Kitigan Zibi’s Land Guardians and a team of botanists conducted preliminary species inventories across the region over the summer. The work resulted in the identification of nine biodiversity hotspots across the Outaouais, five of which are in the Pontiac.

They include the Waltham escarpment, a piece of land on Allumette Island, and three other locations along the Ottawa River where rare plant species were detected. Higgins said all five Pontiac areas are on public lands.

“This makes [conservation] easier in the sense that no one lives there, but then there are other rights, for example forestry rights, that could be impacted.”

All nine areas were recently submitted to the Quebec government’s call for proposals for protected areas.

“Our goal was really to do all the mapping and have the conversations before proposing areas, but because of the call for projects we felt that if we missed that opportunity we might not get a second one,” Higgins said, explaining the province will review them, evaluate them against its own development objectives, and then submit them to a public consultation period.

“When you look at 30 per cent in the Outaouais, what we’ve proposed is a drop in the bucket, and so that’s why we’re hoping to do a more in-depth analysis to look at where some larger protected areas could be.”

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

Davidson resident Jean-Marc Soucie was about a decade into his 34-year career as a Hydro Quebec lineman (and later, supervisor) when he learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of a damaging storm, rather than the guy who comes in to restore order afterwards.

He was living in Aylmer at the time, when a bad storm damaged his house and car, and destroyed his swimming pool. It was at least 48 hours before he was able to return to his home.

“Then I found out what it was to be a victim of all of these storms, so I understand what the people go through because I went through it,” Soucie said.

“But it’s nothing compared to what them people in the Carolinas are living right now. Some people have lost everything. Their house. Their clothes. Their food. They’ve even lost their relatives that drowned. It’s pretty bad over there.”

Soucie was one in a small group of Pontiac men who spent the first three-or-so weeks of October in North Carolina, working to bring power back to the approximately three million people who were without electricity following Hurricane Helene.

The others included his brothers Claude Soucie, Denis Soucie, and Lawrence Gagnon.

Jean-Marc Soucie spent his career doing storm cleanup across eastern Canada and the United States. After retiring in 2012, Soucie was invited to join a workforce of semi-retired hydro technicians employed by Holland Power Services who get called in to do massive hydro restoration projects after high-intensity storms wreak havoc.

The first place Soucie was sent was North Carolina, to clean up damage caused by Tropical Storm Michael in Oct. 2016. As the job was wrapping up, the company asked for volunteers to go straight to the Bahamas for another job.

“So I put my hand up after my wife gave me the okay, and I went to the Bahamas, so we were gone 25 days,” Soucie chuckled. “That’s when I said, ‘You know, I like this gig.’”

Now, Soucie is the general manager for the company’s Iroquois division – one of five it has across eastern Canada.

On this most recent trip to North Carolina, Soucie and a crew of 760 workers with Holland Power Services were called in a day before the hurricane hit, and spent the night waiting out the storm in the hotel.

“We didn’t know what to expect. We were listening to the news, and watching our phones and all of that,” Soucie said. “And then everything went black because we didn’t have any more power. Communication was out because quite a few telecom towers were out. So we woke up the next morning to see all the damage that the hurricane had caused, and then as the days went on, we found out how bad it was.”

Holland Power Service’s vice-president of operations Steve Hansen was also working in North Carolina this month.

“In this case we were seeing things like a 150-foot tall, full-size oak tree, complete with its root ball, that’s knocked down an entire line,” he said, describing the damage crews woke up to the morning after the storm. “There were whole sections of road that were missing.”

Soucie and the group of 118 employees he was responsible for were working mostly in the North Carolina mountains, in both Asheville and Hendersonville – challenging terrain that didn’t make the already difficult work any easier.

“The worst thing that happened is the communications were down. We had a hard time finding where we needed to go, because we rely on our phones to go to addresses,” Soucie said, noting the washed out roads and fallen trees didn’t make getting around any easier.

While in the field, workers were warned to beware of a certain kind of rattlesnake, a dangerous red-headed spider, and ticks, a task Soucie said became more anxiety-inducing when evening would fall, making it harder to see where he was stepping.

Hansen said beyond the obstacles created by the destroyed landscape, the unfamiliar climate often adds an additional challenge to the long work days.

“Coming from a Canadian climate into the Carolinas, the heat and humidity are very high,” he said.
The men worked 16-hour days starting at 6 a.m. At the end of their shift, they would all gather under a tent for a hot buffet-style meal provided by the host utility company, and then usually be in bed by 10 p.m..

Soucie said work was always on the mind, even when he wasn’t actually on the job.

“You have to try to help the people the best you can and the best way we can do that is to put the power back on so they can have something as close to a normal life as it can be.”

In one location where his crew was working, only four of the town’s 64 homes were left standing after the flooding had receded.

Soucie added that in his particular area, 111 people had drowned and 1,000 people were still unaccounted for by the time he was leaving.

“You’re astonished by it and you feel hopeless because you wish you could help in other ways but you don’t have the equipment to do it,” he said.

Hansen said the frequency and intensity of storms varies from year to year, based on all of the climatic factors including the warmth of the ocean, whether it’s an El Nino year, and what the gulf currents are doing.

“But this year has certainly been predicted to be a higher than normal year for number of storms that make landfall, and thus far that is proving to be true, sadly,” he said. “As the climate shifts we are seeing a different set of challenges than when the company was formed a number of years ago.”

Hansen noted the workers do not receive any kind of trauma training, but do receive benefits and access to a call line if they need to process some of the devastation they are bearing witness to.
Soucie, however, said his preferred way of unwinding once he gets home is fairly simple.

“You try to get a good night’s sleep, and have a good beer,” he said.

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.