On Monday, a busload of Pontiac residents took the hour-plus drive – the same drive that expectant mothers from the region will soon have to make – in order to protest the closure of the Pontiac Community Hospital’s obstetrics unit.
During the next six . . .
months, the region’s birthing unit will close up shop because of consistently low staffing levels.
With the unit having to close 14 times since August – and those who staffed the unit when it was open working to the point of exhaustion – it was inevitable that something had to give.
Despite the fact that the CAQ is the one left holding the bag, issues like this have been allowed to fester for years.
Yes, the CAQ can shoulder plenty of the blame after local candidates in the last election made unrealistic promises to build a new hospital instead of focussing on the existing issues within the region’s healthcare system.
But they shouldn’t have to bear the entire weight of this blunder.
While public infrastructure in the province – everything from roads to culverts to the health care system – continue to fail, successive governments have been zeroed in on trivial issues.
For instance, one of the biggest election issues during the last campaign was the CAQ position to ban religious symbols instead of, say, ensuring people can undergo routine procedures at their local hospitals – like giving birth.
While the CAQ government currently figures out a way to implement its ham-fisted abolishment of school boards, expectant mothers in the Pontiac are going to have to endure the hour-plus drive on the notoriously smooth Highway 148.
Despite the fact that Pontiac Liberal MNA André Fortin was on hand at the protest on Monday – and he has been a vocal critic of the region’s healthcare system – his Liberal government didn’t fare much better when it was in power.
His government’s Health Minister, Gaétan Barrette, became the face of the province’s healthcare failures and was persona non-grata with angry provincial healthcare workers.
Just to highlight the Quebec political scene’s fixation on meaningless issues, when he was appointed Barrette was forced to defend himself as a debate raged over whether he should even be the Health Minister as critics argued he was too overweight.
An online petition asking Barrette to lose weight actually garnered more than 9,500 signatures.
It got to the point that just six months before the last election, pundits were wondering aloud whether Barrette would be the Liberal’s “undoing.”
Meanwhile, staffing shortages caused an explosion of overtime for healthcare workers under the Liberal’s watch.
It doesn’t help that in a system that’s heavily criticized, the Outaouais region is worse off in most metrics when it comes to healthcare delivery.
The Outaouais even pays for the fact that it is where it is.
Fortin cited the region’s proximity to Ontario and the pay gap for nurses between the two provinces as the main factor impacting the staffing levels at the hospital.
According to nearly 7,000 job postings and applications on Indeed.com, the average nursing wage in Ontario is $33.93 per hour.
While the numbers for Quebec aren’t as robust, the 135 postings and applications on Indeed.com indicate an average wage of $25.49 for nurses in the province.
Looking at the numbers, its clearly a no-brainer to take the short drive across the river if the opportunity is there.
To further complicate the budgetary constraints, Quebec also trains its nurses for a much cheaper cost.
The average undergraduate tuition in Ontario is around $8,000 per year, whereas in Quebec – the province with the cheapest rates – the cost is around $3,000.
That formula may work for the rest of the province, but it’s actively harming the health care network in this region.
Here, the government subsidizes education so that nurses are trained for around half the price compared to Ontario, where those same nurses decide to work because the wages are better.
Ontario gets a great deal because its healthcare system gets the nurse’s expertise without paying a dime for their training.
Not only is Quebec shelling out more to train each nurse, but the healthcare system barely gets to use their expertise – if at all.
This doesn’t make any economic sense.
Then again, this is the same province that proclaimed a fifth-straight balanced budget last March, despite receiving more than $11 billion in equalization payments.
Maybe its time to start incentivizing nurses to stay in the province.
The obvious answer of “just pay the nurses in this region more,” is a can of worms any government would want to avoid with a ten-foot pole.
Since that would be a tough political sell for the government, there could be other practical ways to retain nurses.
Maybe nurses who get financial assistance with their tuition from the province would have to pay a higher rate on their loans – one similar to the costs in Ontario – if they choose to work in that province.
Those extra funds could then be used to make the pay scale for nurses working in Quebec more competitive with those across the provincial border.
The Quebec government is notorious for the hard stance it’s taken against trades workers from Ontario working in Quebec.
If a contractor from Ontario takes the risk of doing work in Quebec without paying for a license, he or she could face steep fines.
Perhaps the province could pay the same attention to the nurses headed out of the province as the contractors coming in.
But then again, that would require some messy discussions that successive governments have been working hard to avoid by focussing on claptrap like banning religious symbols.
Chris Lowrey
