Vigi Santé

By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

Last week’s heat wave broke daytime records. Yet for all the warnings issued by the government and medical professionals, particularly for senior citizens, reports surfaced about seniors’ residences that had no air conditioning, with many reaching indoor temperatures of 30 degrees, as was apparently the case with the CHSLD Vigi Reine-Elizabeth in NDG.

Vigi Santé is a family-owned business that administers 15 CHSLDs in Quebec, including the Reine-Elizabeth. The facility has already been the subject of complaints going back to an outbreak of Covid-19 in November 2021. The following year there were reports of inadequate care, prompting an external investigation launched by the Quebec government.

In an email to The Suburban, Vigi Santé spokesperson Hélène Beauséjour addressed the situation that occurred last June 24, saying all “authorized” air conditioners were functioning. However she did confirm that residents’ rooms are not connected to the central air-conditioning system, that the building on Northcliffe Ave, like many others in the network, is too old for that. Limited electrical capacity also does not allow for individual units to be installed “without major adaptations.”

Matt Del Vecchio is the owner of Lianas Transition Support and Premier Home Care. He tells The Suburban that when families are looking for residences for their aging parents, air conditioning is not necessarily top of mind. But the system here in Quebec doesn’t make the problem easy to solve. Quebec should be more like Ontario, Del Vecchio says, where air conditioning in seniors’ residence rooms is mandated by law. In fact, in Ontario just over 99 percent of seniors’ residences have air conditioning in the rooms. Conversely, in Quebec, as of 2023, only about 60 percent of seniors’ residence rooms are air conditioned.

That is not to say that in Quebec seniors can’t have air conditioning. Del Vecchio, who also writes the Seniors and Aging column for The Suburban, explains that if a CHSLD resident requests an air conditioner for their room, the facility has to provide and install one at no charge. However, echoing Beauséjour’s explanations, he says that some facilities are too old and might not have the electrical capability to accommodate individual air conditioners. And even if they do, residents and their families might not think about it until a heat wave kicks in.

Beauséjour confirmed that “all residents of the 15 Vigi CHSLDs who wished to have an air conditioning unit in their room were able to benefit from one: these units were all installed by our technical department,” she said, “as early as May. It is truly the personal choice of each resident that dictates the installation (or not) of air conditioning in each room.”

As for the sweltering heat on June 24, Beauséjour said that the temperature in the facility’s cooling islands ranged between 22 and 24 degrees. There was, she admits, a temporary outage of the central air conditioning system “causing a slight decrease in its efficiency.” But the situation, she says, was quickly resolved.

“We need to advocate for air conditioning in residents’ rooms,” Del Vecchio says, adding that it should be considered as important as sprinkler systems. It is indeed an expensive prospect. Del Vecchio speculates that the expense is what’s holding the government back. But with the climate change reality in Montreal, and the population aging, says Del Vecchio, this is a problem that needs investment. n