Dear Editor,
I was intrigued by the title of your editorial (April 7th, 2021): “CAQ gets a failing grade.” While the meandering editorial seems to address the issues of poor school ventilation and the care and treatment of seniors during the pandemic, I’d like to remind the editor that . . .
teachers don’t fail students in the middle of the school year.
This is what the editorial does. Even as it recognizes that we find ourselves in a “new situation with a lot of moving parts” … Parts that keep evolving and changing and are hard social issues to be dealt with, seeing as they comprise elements of health care, social behaviour, regular communication and much more funding for an inadequately funded health care system.
A more productive and constructive editorial would have addressed each issue with the thoroughness and detail that those issues deserve in Quebec. Poor ventilation in schools has been a long simmering problem, many years in the making and the fix, especially during the stress of a pandemic, would be disruptive and very expensive to do. What is THE EQUITY’s solution?
The pandemic has shown that our society has treated seniors in residences with indifference, as an afterthought. Our most vulnerable citizens needing hands-on-care surely deserve better from a prosperous nation. They do not deserve to be dealt with at the whims of shady, run by night for profit operators. The calls for better treatment actions must be followed up by serious funding, analysis of what is needed, and with a new look at the whole issue of a changing, aging demographic. The federal government has failed at this.
As far as criticism goes, Mark Sutcliffe writing in the Ottawa Citizen wrote April 9 that the Ontario response to the pandemic “has been a confusing dance of half-measures that have solved absolutely nothing.” Ontario reported more than 4,000 new COVID cases the next day, so the Ontario situation is dramatically worsening. Failing grade?
Tom Connelly wrote in a letter to The Citizen that “our government has been totally inept at securing and distributing vaccine. The federal government has failed its people.”
One hopes that there are serious changes arising from the consequences of this pandemic. We need to revise our societal direction and properly invest in our public institutions like schools and residences for seniors and in our health care system so that people get timely, good care.
Carl Hager, Pontiac, Que.
VP of Pontiac NDP
