It’s very good news that Pontiac Hospital’s medical imaging technicians will receive an $18,000 pay bonus. Congratulations to everyone who made a big noise about the problem – hospital staff and administrators, doctors, citizen activists, mayors, the warden, and the MNA. As Warden Toller has put it, someone was listening.

Why the Pontiac and Wakefield hospitals were overlooked in the first place is a question that remains unanswered.

We can understand why the bonus was offered in Hull and Gatineau, both with easy access to hospitals in Ontario. And both with medical imaging technicians who let it be known they were ready to bolt for the better pay across the river.

And we can understand why the bonus was offered to technicians in Maniwaki and Papineau who could otherwise have easily made the move to Hull or Gatineau to qualify for it, or gone all the way to Ontario, for that matter.

But why not Pontiac and Wakefield? The argument that we were thought to be too far from the hospitals in Hull and Gatineau for there to be a real risk of staff leaving, doesn’t hold water. If Maniwaki, which is a 90-minute drive to Hull and Gatineau, is close enough to warrant a bonus, then so are Wakefield, which is just 30 minutes away, and Shawville which is 60.

But forget about how close we are to Hull and Gatineau. At least as important is the commuting distance for Pontiac-based technicians to other hospitals in Ontario. Depending on what part of the Pontiac they live in, the hospitals in Renfrew and Pembroke could be as close as a 20-minute drive away.

Assuming the very best of intentions on the part of decision-makers in the CAQ government, at the very least they need a lesson on the geography of west Quebec.

Or was the crisis of several medical imaging technicians in Hull and Gatineau planning to seek greener pastures perceived as more pressing than the situation in the Pontiac where no such intention had, at that point, been expressed? In other words, was there a kind of triage performed to address the most acute problems first, similar to how hospital staff assign priority among patients that come into the emergency department? Is this how Quebec’s healthcare system is running now, kind of like a trauma unit lurching from crisis to crisis?

However grateful we are that bonuses were eventually offered to staff in our local hospital, there is still much to be done to put healthcare in the Pontiac on a sustainable footing.

If the bonuses were intended to level the playing field among hospitals on the Quebec and Ontario sides of the Ottawa River, they have failed to do so. For starters, the $18,000 bonus offered in Pontiac is $4,000 shy of the $22,000 offered in Hull and Gatineau. Several people who have already applied for transfer to Hull or Gatineau are planning to see that process through.

And the bonus has been offered for only a two-year period, unlike the permanently higher salaries available in Ontario. While it comes with a 10 per cent salary increase over the summer months, as long as the technician is willing to work two additional hours per week, neither the bonus nor the temporary salary increase will count toward their pensions. The jobs in Quebec will simply never provide the long-term security that comes with the same jobs in Ontario.

The other glaring omission, of course, is the fact that the temptation to move elsewhere for better pay is common to many on our hospital staff, not just imaging technicians, and is fundamental to the challenge of recruiting and retaining nurses and other medical experts necessary to maintaining fully-functioning healthcare services.

While decision-makers have taken a step that may help avert the immediate crisis, there are many more challenges ahead that will require them to have a firmer grasp of the geography of the upper Ottawa Valley. Anyone needing further assistance with this is invited to consult the map below.

But this whole episode is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise. There is a chronic problem with how healthcare is managed and funded in Quebec, with acute implications here along the province’s western edge.

We urgently need a government that will go beyond treatment of only the symptoms and put in place a fully-funded strategy to cure the illness.

Charles Dickson