Pontiac

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

The race for the Conservative Party candidate for the Pontiac-Kitigan Zibi riding in the next federal election finally closed its doors to new entries on Nov. 13, with a total of six people having thrown their name in the hat to be considered for the job.

Brian Goodman, Michel Gauthier, Terrence Watters, Mark Buzan, Brian Nolan, and Jean-Nicolas de Bellefeuille each confirmed they’re hoping to receive the party’s nomination, however Watters did not respond to The Equity’s questions by publication deadline, so his answers will be published in next week’s issue.

Below are brief summaries of each candidate, based on responses they submitted by email. THE EQUITY has yet to obtain official confirmation from the Conservative Party of Canada that these candidates have indeed been accepted into the nomination race.
Residents of the riding who wish to vote at the nomination meeting, the date and time of which have yet to be publicly confirmed, must be a registered member of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Michel Gauthier

Michel Gauthier, originally from Maniwaki, currently lives in the town of Bois-Franc, 15 kilometres north of Maniwaki. He ran as the Conservative Party candidate for the Pontiac-Kitigan Zibi riding in the 2021 federal election, and spent 10 years working for the Gatineau Liberal Association, both as president and as head of communications for then MNA Stéphanie Vallée. Prior to this, he spent two decades working as a journalist in Gatineau covering political news at municipal, provincial and federal levels.
He said his choice to run for the Conservative Party is a question of values.

“I am a fiscal conservative and I am member and candidate for the CPC because this party is the only one that takes into account the sound financial management of the country before making decisions whose effects can then extend over decades,” he wrote in an email.

“I also completely agree with Mr. Poilievre’s common sense approach.One of the most striking examples is the proposal to cut the GST when buying a new home.”

He said the top three subjects he’s campaigning on are his belief that the construction of the nuclear waste disposal facility at Chalk River should not continue until studies on alternative sites have been done; a review of the federal government’s teleworking policy with the ambition of making employment with the federal public service accessible to people living in rural communities; and pushing for the construction of a Gatineau tramway, which he said is an important project for the west of the city, but municipal officials will have to understand that it will require urban densification to justify the costs, not moratoria on housing development.

Jean-Nicolas de Bellefeuille

Jean-Nicolas de Bellefeuille grew up in Val-des-Monts, and says his close proximity to nature as a child showed him “how deeply nature embodies freedom.”
“It’s a perspective that guides my approach to policies – aiming for sustainable practices that protect our environment while ensuring that future generations can enjoy the same sense of freedom and connection to the land.”

He is in his second term as a councillor for the municipality of Cantley, and spent four of his seven years in that job as president of the municipal Urban Planning Advisory Committee, both experiences which he says have equipped him with “a deep understanding of the machinery of government and a steadfast commitment to public service and ethical governance.”

In his email response to THE EQUITY, he explained his work with the urban planning committee “taught him the critical importance of balancing growth with environmental stewardship, a principle that is increasingly vital at the federal level as we address national challenges such as housing, infrastructure development and climate change.”

He’s chosen to run for the Conservative Party “because its values align closely with his own vision for Canada’s future – one grounded in fiscal responsibility, individual freedom, and the efficiency of small government.”

The top three policy changes he is campaigning on are reducing taxes, which he believes are too high and therefore putting “undue strain on hard working Canadians”; building homes by cutting red tape and incentivizing development; and preserving natural heritage by expanding parks and protected areas.

“I’m committed to advocating for the purchase of additional forest land for parks, ensuring these green spaces are available for generations to come.”

Mark Buzan

Mark Buzan is originally from southwestern Ontario but currently resides in the Plateau, in Gatineau, and has lived in the Outaouais since 1997. His political career began in the late 90s when he worked as the Legislative Assistant to then-MP Jason Kenney, who went on to become Minister of Immigration under Stephen Harper and more recently, Premier of Alberta. In 1998, Buzan was also a candidate for the Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a provincial political party that shut down in 2012. Finally, for over two decades Buzan has worked as a party organizer in the Outaouais for what he calls the conservative movement, most recently as the executive vice-president for the Conservative Party of Quebec.

“My conservative values drive me to advocate for policies that empower small businesses, reduce unnecessary government interference, and restore integrity, efficiency, and honesty to our governance,” Buzan wrote to THE EQUITY, explaining his decision to run for the Conservative Party.

He said his political priorities include reducing the high cost of living for Canadians, which he believes is caused by excessive government spending and the creation of federal taxes such as the carbon tax and capital gains tax. He also said he would work to cut back regulations preventing small business and resource development in the Pontiac-Kitigan Zibi riding, in an effort to create “a thriving local economy,” and support policies that incentivize municipalities to issue more permits for housing construction, in line with Pierre Poilievre’s commitment for bonuses on municipalities that meet their targets, this in an effort to support younger people wishing to establish roots in the region.

Brian Nolan

Brian Nolan was raised in Quebec City. He moved to Ottawa when he was 20, where he finished his studies in computer science, and has now lived in Chelsea, Que. for over 30 years.

Nolan cites his 25 years in the public service, his 15 years owning an IT consulting company and three years co-owning a Spoon Frozen Yogurt lounge in the ByWard market as experiences that played important parts in the development of his political senses, each in different ways giving him an understanding of the operations of the federal government.

In his email to THE EQUITY, he said his experience working in the public service, for example, “taught [him] the importance of transparent and accountable governance and gave me valuable insights into the complexities of policy making.”

He also said his role as vice-president and president of the Des Collines de l’Outaouais Minor Hockey Association strengthened his ties with the community, allowing him to “promote youth development and support local families.”

Nolan said he’s running to represent the Conservative Party because he believes in “the importance of fiscal responsibility, individual freedom, and the power of local communities to address local issues,” he wrote. “In short, I chose to run as a Conservative because I believe in balanced progress that respects tradition, supports hard-working Canadians, and fosters self-reliance and opportunity.”

Nolan said he would prioritize local economic development and support for small businesses, improving housing accessibility, and improving the quality of life for seniors through policies that “no longer treat them as an afterthought,” but that “ensure they enjoy their golden years with dignity, financial security, and access to world-class health care.”

Brian Goodman

Brian Goodman currently lives in Chelsea, Que., but is originally from the small town of Stonewall, Man.. He moved to the Ottawa-Gatineau area in 2008, after several years in Saskatchewan.

His political experience includes working for the Minister of Justice, Don Morgan, in the Saskatchewan Party government in 2007, as well as for Saskatchewan Conservative MP Ray Boughen on Parliament Hill. He also cites his time working with the federal government in various capacities, most recently with Canada’s export credit agency, Export Development Canada, and the dozen or so political campaigns he’s worked on in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec as critical to his political career.

“I’ve essentially been around politics and government from all angles for 15 years and would argue that very few people have the experience, knowledge, or network that I do in Ottawa,” he wrote.

In his email to THE EQUITY, Goodman said he’s running for this riding’s Conservative seat because “it pains [him] to watch the Liberals/NDP drive our country (and young people especially) ever deeper into debt, while letting housing and cost of living get out of control.”

“Conservatives are the only party that prioritizes the economy and since I work in trade, their focus on productivity and competitiveness is particularly appealing to me,” he wrote. “Closer to home, I know that Conservatives are much more in tune with rural communities.”

He said the top three policy issues he would focus on would be “economic opportunities for people in rural parts of the riding, and on competitiveness [and] productivity issues more broadly; housing and cost of living issues for both urban and rural parts of the riding; and protecting the environment of the riding, including Gatineau Park, the Ottawa River, and beyond.”

Terrence Watters

Terrence Watters did not respond to THE EQUITY’s emailed questions. However, the real estate broker and former casino manager was the candidate for the Conservative Party of Quebec in the 2022 provincial election. More can be learned about his policy priorities by visiting https://theequity.ca/candidates-take-questions-at-forum/ and https://theequity.ca/candidates-clash-at-the-winery-conversation-with-the-candidates-hosted-by-the-equity/.

Update: Nov. 27, 2024  Since this article was first published, THE EQUITY has learned that Terrence Watters has decided not to run, and Mark Buzan’s application is under review.

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.

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.”

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.