Why are radiation technologists working in the Shawville and Wakefield hospitals being offered a smaller bonus for staying put than has been offered to their counterparts in other hospitals in the region?
What is the basis of this discrimination?
It first reared its ugly head a few months ago when it was announced that bonuses were being offered to imaging techs working in only a few of the hospitals, not including ours.
After the alarm was sounded, an $18,000 bonus was eventually offered to those in the Shawville and Wakefield hospitals, which is $4,000 shy of what was offered in Gatineau, Hull and Papineau.
As predicted, this $4,000 shortfall per person means that five of the six full-time radiologists who work in the Shawville hospital are planning to leave their jobs in September and take up work in hospitals where the full $22,000 bonus is being offered.
The implications of this for our local healthcare facilities are existential. How can you run a hospital without the ability to take an x-ray on short notice? How can you run an OR or even just a walk-in clinic? All for the lack of $4,000 for each of six radiologists so they get the same bonus the government has offered elsewhere.
To make matters worse, the challenge of hiring replacement staff will be all the greater given that the hospitals in Hull and Gatineau continue to have vacancies to fill and will have the benefit of being able to offer the full $22,000 bonus in recruiting candidates. This promises to make it even less likely that someone would come here to work when they could get more money to work there.
For years, efforts by west Quebec hospitals to recruit and retain staff have put them into competition with Ontario hospitals. Now, thanks to this failed bonus policy, west Quebec hospitals are being put into competition with each other, a competition where the odds are stacked in favour of the urban hospitals.
We know that this government is fully capable of coming up with rationales for discriminating against various segments of society. Religion and language are top-of-mind examples. What is its justification in this case which is on track to drive healthcare workers out of our area, further undermining the viability of our hospital and, by extension, our community?
Is this part of a long-range plan to reduce the Pontiac Hospital to a shadow of its former self, or perhaps close it altogether? If this is not the plan, we need urgent action by the health minister or the premier himself to avert the looming disaster.
As citizens of Quebec and of Canada, our right to health care requires that the people who provide it be treated fairly. We need our hospital techs to be offered the same bonus that has been offered to their colleagues elsewhere in the region.
Anything less cannot be seen as anything other than a signal of the intention to let the Pontiac Hospital languish and the population of the Pontiac along with it.
It is no longer a technical matter for tinkering by the treasury board; it is an intensely political matter revolving around questions of justice requiring attention at the highest level.
