Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:28 on 2021-10-27 Permalink Reply  

• mare 12:38 on 2021-10-27 Permalink

  “our population is getting older”

  Gosh, what a surprise, who could have predicted that?

  Why haven’t we built enough CHLSDs to meet the predictable demand? The waiting lists are ridiculously long for decades, this is not a new situation.
  All the shortages of money and people in healthcare existed before Covid, they’re just exacerbated and getting more press now.

  This hospital overcrowding is going to cost lives, or probably already *is* costing lives. People read these articles and they don’t go to the hospital or see a doctor and many serious conditions are diagnosed too late. (Cynical me says that the waiting lists won’t get longer that way, and maybe our politicians are cynical as well.)

  This nurses shortage is not going away anytime soon, but will get worse, much worse. Nurses are burning out, some have to stop working because they refuse to get vaccinated and some of them are just also of retirement age. Nursing school takes 2 years and students need support during their practical periods. Nurses don’t have time to give them that support. I’m not sure enrolment is very high at the moment.
  We should import some nurses from elsewhere. Oh wait, we reduced our immigration quotas and nurses are in high demand in every other country in the world. And even qualified nurses from other francophone countries, like France, first need many months of additional schooling before they can work in Quebec.

  And the situation is the same with doctors and other medical professionals. The Quebec healthcare system has been cracking at the seams for years, and they will come apart eventually.

• Spi 19:30 on 2021-10-27 Permalink

  School age children don’t just magically appear, yet we failed to build schools, Even freaking Cegep’s are forecasted to be (and already are) short on space and they’ve got a solid decade minimum to see a trend coming.

  Growing population with stagnant affordable residential housing stock.

  Don’t mistake this for a health-care problem, it’s a QC politics problem. Inept politicians that would rather spend their time picking a fight with Ottawa and what ever made up problem that QMI can drum up instead of showing the least bit of foresight.

• Kate 09:52 on 2021-10-28 Permalink

  Spi, I have a theory about this that I’ve ventilated here before. Quebec achieved a great deal in the early 1960s when it turfed out the control of the Catholic church over education and health care, built new highways, dams, bridges and schools, and refocused its life away from religion onto nationalism. It’s not for nothing they call it the Quiet Revolution. But as a culture we seem to have felt that we made a huge effort and now it was done. That the new structures would need constant maintenance, renewal and repairs was not part of the vision.

  We even forgot to do proper maintenance on buildings, bridges and roads that lingered from before the Q.R., so that we’ve had to tear down schools and rebuild them because they got so moldy and unsafe.

  I don’t know what this kind of social amnesia is called, and I don’t know whether it has happened in other forms elsewhere, but we’ve certainly lived through it here.

• Kevin 15:43 on 2021-10-28 Permalink

  Social amnesia is the perfect term for a province losing its institutional memory. It happens anywhere with a lot of churn and leads to lots of easily prevented disasters.

  There’s a whole whackadoo of articles about corporate amnesia: mining safety, deepwater rig, banking collapses…