According to the IRIS study requested by Équité Outaouais, the Outaouais has a funding shortfall of $150 million per year in its healthcare system, and this is on top of the $100 million paid to Ontario. Due to Barrette’s reform, citizens no longer have easy access to the healthcare system. The situation has become unmanageable and inhumane, especially in Shawville. The time has come to realize that the last 8 years of QLP reign in the Pontiac have not served us well.
Québec solidaire will act to end this nonsense that has become the healthcare situation in the Outaouais. Québec solidaire is the only party with the political courage to significantly raise the revenues of the State. With these funds, we will bring the Outaouais up to speed. We are ready to take bold actions to address and reverse our region’s history of chronic under-funding compared to similarly-sized regions in Quebec.

To help make up for this shortfall in our healthcare system, we will:
– Refocus the healthcare system’s priority on the citizen, both as a patient and an employee (human scale services).
– Decentralize services to counter the monstrosity that has become the CISSSO.
– Ensure easy access to services by opening CLSCs/community health centers 24/7 in all MRCs in the Outaouais. Each CLSC will get multidisciplinary teams that can provide health services in all domains: first aid, mental health, nutrition, physiotherapy, etc.
– Preserve the public and free nature of our system by countering privatization and surprise fees.
– Develop healthcare infrastructure in consultation with institutions and the population, to ensure our existing infrastructure is safe and responds to the needs of both patients and employees.
– Eliminate the salary gap in all healthcare employment groups with the aim of achieving parity with Ontario (as we will do with physicians—by reducing their salaries to those paid to Ontario physicians…) and improve employees’ work conditions in collaboration with unions (end mandatory overtime, for example) to retain healthcare staff in the region.
– Establish a Faculty of Health Sciences at UQO linked to the Faculty of Medicine and add programs in the field of health at Cégep. This will help train health specialists in our region, in hope that they will stay and work in our region.