Montreal Economic Institute

Lachine doctor calls recent ER study “a tragic commentary”

Local Journalism Initiative / / / , ,

By Chelsey St-Pierre
The Suburban

A study by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) that was published recently revealed shocking numbers of patients who walked out of emergency rooms (ER) without receiving medical care due to lengthy wait times.

According to the study’s findings, over a period of approximately 11 months in 2023-2024, 3.2 million patients visited Quebec’s emergency departments, and 11.5 per cent of them, or 376,460 people, left before receiving medical attention.

“This is a tragic commentary on our healthcare system. Many patients either don’t have a family doctor or have tried to go to a clinic, so this often is their last resort. Most people with benign conditions will not wait 12, 14, 16 hours or more to be seen by an emergency room physician. We need to track these patients to know what their conditions were. Did they find care elsewhere? Did they get worse? Did their condition improve?” Dr. Paul Saba, a family physician operating in Lachine, said to The Suburban.

According to the Quebec Statistics Institute (ISQ), 26.7 per cent of Quebecers did not have a primary care physician in 2023. This number had gone up by nearly nine per cent since 2019. “We cannot operate adequately with a healthcare system where nearly thirty percent of the population has no family doctor along with a lack of hospital care capacity. These two issues coupled together can lead to increased deaths that could have been avoided otherwise,” Saba explained. “We need to increase the numbers of family doctors in the community and emergency room doctors in the hospitals.”

When asked how these issues could be improved, Dr. Saba stated that “doctors need improved working conditions to be encouraged to stay in the province and avoid too many of them switching to the private sector. Another option is to slow down the retirement of family doctors by giving them incentives. We need to continue to increase class sizes in medical schools and prioritize family medicine. For hospitals and ER’s specifically, to welcome more doctors — we need to train more nurses. They too need to be incentivized to choose and choose to remain in the profession with adequate pay and healthy working conditions.” n

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Montreal over-regulates housing, affecting affordability: MEI

Local Journalism Initiative / / / ,

By Joel Goldenberg
The Suburban

Montreal more heavily regulates housing than 73 percent of Canadian cities and provinces surveyed by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, resulting in an eroding of affordability and increases in housing prices, says a new study released by the Montreal Economic institute.

“The more regulation there is, the longer it takes and the more it costs to build new units, thus making housing more expensive and harder to find,” stated Vincent Geloso, senior economist at the MEI and author of the study. “Contrary to what the Mayor (Valérie Plante) claims, the market is capable of responding to demand; the city just needs to allow it to play its role.”

Geloso adds that the study also shows that “the higher the index of regulation is, the higher the ratio between housing prices and income tends to be.

“For example, Greater Vancouver has the highest index of regulation in the country,” the study says. “A home there costs 14.18 times the income of the people who live in the area. In contrast, Greater Edmonton has the lowest index of regulation. The price of a home there is around 4.35 times the income of its residents. Montreal is in the middle of the pack in terms of regulation, and housing costs residents around 6.18 times their income. Between the 1970s and the mid-2000s, however, the price of a home was around three times the income of Montrealers.”

Geloso also stated that “the increase in the time required to obtain a building permit clearly shows the loss of flexibility resulting from regulation.

“When it takes an average of 540 days to obtain the authorization to build in the Mayor’s borough, obviously it’s the administration, not the market, that’s to blame.”

Other points in the report:

• “If prices are rising, as they currently are, it is because demand is growing faster than supply. However, this can be the result of ill- advised government policies that prevent supply from increasing. In such a case, the problem is not the market, but rather the obstacles put in place that are hindering its proper functioning.”

• Regulatory obstacles include: “density limits, parking-to-customer ratio rules for retail spaces, overly strict zoning regulations and restrictions on building characteristics (height, dimensions, materials), mandatory permits, property taxes, and rent control.”

• Such obstacles “increase housing construction costs, and maintenance costs once units are built. This reduces the incentive to build new units, thus lowering housing starts. Ultimately, this leads to a permanent increase in the cost of housing, all else being equal.” As well, “they make supply more rigid, meaning that it responds more slowly to increasing demand. Thus, when there is a demand shock, such as a rapid increase in the size of the population, normally temporary price increases last longer. Third, these regulations tend to affect certain kinds of housing more than others, such that the remaining market orients it-self to serve a different clientele. In general, what we see is a reorientation toward richer households.”

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“City of Montreal is largest slumlord’: MEI

Local Journalism Initiative / / / , , ,

By Joel Goldenberg
The Suburban

The Montreal Economic Institute says that the Plante administration is Montreal’s largest slumlord, and should stay out of the housing market.

The latest MEI study says that Montreal’s social housing stock has worsened in the last five years, but Plante insists on building more such housing.

“Those who require housing assistance are being forced to live in deplorable conditions,” says Gabriel Giguère, senior public policy analyst at the MEI and author of the study. “Before purchasing and building more units, City Hall needs to address the fact that it has become Montreal’s largest slumlord.”

The study points out that “as part of its 2050 Land Use and Mobility Plan, the Plante administration aims to see 20 per cent of Montreal’s projected housing stock removed from the market. This would require building or purchasing 161,000 units at taxpayer expense by 2050.”

The MEI says the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM) manages 20,818 low-rent housing units, and that, of these “79.2 per cent were considered to be in either poor or very poor condition in April 2023. This is up from 47.6 per cent in 2019. The share of housing in very poor condition has increased even more significantly over this period, from 10.2 per cent to 48.5 per cent.” The organization also cited a quote from Plante to La Presse that the city can “no longer rely on the market in terms of creating new social housing.”

The MEI study argues that the solution to the unaffordability of housing is reducing the administration’s role in housing development.

“It’s a bit rich for Mayor Plante to claim that the market has not worked, given the number of hurdles her administration has added to housing development,” Giguère says. “Whether it’s through taxes on new homes, or longer permit delays, or even the outright obstruction of newbuild housing, her administration has made life more difficult for developers trying to build.”

The researcher adds that Montreal’s 20-20-20 bylaw, requiring that 20 percent of a new residential construction must be social housing, “amounts to a tax of up to $10,500 per new housing unit built for projects of six units or more.”

As well, “the average time it takes to obtain a residential construction permit has increased from 204 days to 326 days between 2019 and 2023. In the borough of Ville-Marie, it took an average of 540 days to get a residential building permit in 2023.

A previous MEI study says that “since coming into office, the Plante administration has obstructed the construction of projects totalling 23,760 units.” As well, “the city’s 2050 Land Use and Mobility Plan aims to add fewer units to the city’s housing stock than what would be built if the average pace of the past five years was simply maintained.

“Developers want to build in Montreal, but this administration does everything it can to stand in their way,” Giguère says. “Instead of trying to build fewer homes with more taxpayer money, the city should stop preventing the market from filling the need for housing.” n

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Lachine doctor warns of “deeply concerning” failing ER stats

Local Journalism Initiative / / / , , ,

By Chelsey St-Pierre
The Suburban

The Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) published troubling results of its 2023-2024 study of Quebec’s Emergency Room (ER) statistics revealing that 11.5 per cent of visitors left this past year before receiving medical treatment.

According to the study, conducted over an 11-month period, the number of patients who visited ERs over the last year is 3.2 million with 377,404 patients leaving prior to receiving medical care, mainly due to lengthy wait times averaging 5 hours and 13 minutes in ERs across Quebec. The data collected in the study does not include the number of patients that were referred to another health-care provider outside of the ER at the time of their visit.

The study, headed by economist Emmanuelle B. Faubert, also reveals that 27.5 per cent of the patients that left the ERs were category P1, P2 and P3 patients, all of which are patients requiring urgent care. Over 70 per cent of category P4 and P5 patients seeking non-urgent care left the ERs without being treated.

Faubert says that any patient leaving the ER is concerning. “A patient who leaves without treatment runs the risk of worsening his or her condition and returning to the emergency department as a more complex case.”

Dr. Paul Saba, a family physician in Lachine, Quebec, is calling the study “a tragic commentary on our healthcare system”.

“Many patients don’t have a family doctor or have tried to go to a clinic (prior to visiting an ER), so this often is their last resort. Most people with benign conditions won’t wait so many hours to be seen by an emergency room physician,” Saba explained to The Suburban.

In his ongoing fight entitled “Save the Lachine Hospital” Saba says that this is just one of many examples of how the healthcare system is failing to provide necessary services that can save lives and shorten wait times. “With the ICU closed at the Lachine Hospital since December 2020, this exacerbates waiting times for our patients, not only here but on the rest of the island.”

Faubert says that in consideration of increased budgets and reforms, this is a major problem. “This is a big problem because it shows that our health-care system is incapable of taking care of Quebecers and it’s dangerous when you consider that the population is aging and needs are increasing.” n

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