Christian Dubé has handed the management of health care in Quebec to a champion of private medicine.
Updates from April, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A five-alarm fire broke out Monday morning at a shelter for homeless women in Petite‑Patrie, putting 37 people who were staying there back out on the street. Neither piece says exactly where the building is, but the fire department Twitter feed makes it de Lanaudière and Bellechasse, across from Père‑Marquette park. The cause of the fire has not been mentioned.
CBC says a firefighter had an arm injury, but TVA makes it an ankle. Tsk tsk, the two solitudes.
Spi
SIDM’s twitter account places the fire at de Lanaudière and bellechase.
Kate
I just spotted that before you posted, but thanks!
mare
It’s at a stone’s throw near me. It was on Lanaudiere and the ruelle near Bellechasse. That building had extensive roof work done for the past weeks, I don’t know if the work was finished and if the fire was related.
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Kate
Frank Zampino will finally face trial in 2025 on charges related to corruption during his time as chairman of Montreal’s executive committee during the Tremblay era.
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Kate
The tone of reports Monday on the growing pro‑Palestinian protest camp on the McGill campus suggests that the university’s next move will be the police, as it has been on campuses in the United States.
17:30 CBC radio news mentioned police. Won’t be long now. Radio‑Canada mentions an injunction.
CBC looks into where McGill’s money is invested.
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Kate
A staffing company that did business with several CIUSSSes around town was hiring out immigrant “volunteers” without work permits who worked for $10 an hour cleaning hospitals and feeding patients. Le Devoir also reports on the woman that ran the agency and her history. The serious question here is: didn’t anyone at the CIUSSSes know who they were doing business with?
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Kate
The average age of the last Sisters of Notre-Dame is 90, and they’re preparing to sell the vast piece of land that lies between Westmount and NDG, that their order has owned since 1854.
walkerp
It sounds like the money for the sale will go to care for the remaining nuns and the rest to a good non-profit, so that’s positive.
Meezly
Rather sad that my first thought about the remaining nuns was whether they had abused any children under their charge.
Kate
It wasn’t an orphanage, at least not in our times, but a rather posh private girls’ school. I knew someone who went there, and while it was prey to the usual snobbery found in schools like that, I never got the sense anyone was abused by the nuns. Not girls with relatively wealthy parents.
Meezly
I probably confused them with the Grey Nuns
https://www.catholicregister.org/item/34990-quebec-religious-orders-face-off-over-abuse-liabilityKate
The overall abuse problem was that nobody wanted to query the church, and that included priests, nuns and brothers doing all kinds of jobs. The Grey Nuns were basically hospital nurses of a time before modern medicine. The CND – the Congregation of Notre Dame – provided school teachers for girls, while the Christian Brothers taught boys. The Clercs of Saint Viateur that used to own the big building on St‑Laurent near de Castelnau provided services to the deaf – and abused them too. And there were other bad situations with orphans and other powerless people.
There were probably abuses in all corners of society where these orders functioned, but an aura of authority and secrecy hung over them and made it difficult to impossible for anyone to report abuses. Only after the Quiet Revolution replaced the church with secular institutions to manage education, health care and social services were questions asked, and – too late for most victims – some restitution given.
(One reason I get irked at seeing anglos blamed for oppression in Quebec is that so much of the oppression was dealt out by the Catholic church and willingly accepted, even welcomed, by most people.)
jeather
Now the abuse problem is that the church can and does still just shuffle abusers around and play games about how a specific diocese has zero money so sorry. The government no longer helps them out so much, at least.
Ian
It’s kind of intersting that both Marianapolis and Villa-Maria were renting from the nuns. Sounds like VM is still working on funding but Marianapolis already bought their property.
https://globalnews.ca/news/10457689/villa-maria-high-school-wont-move/
Joey
So 500 nuns who are on average just shy of 90 years old need are about to sell land worth hundreds of millions of dollars? Let’s generously assume each nun would need $250K to cover her costs for the rest of her life, we’re still talking only $125M… are they really going to spend hundreds of millions on scholarships? What’s missing here?
Uatu 23:58 on 2024-04-29 Permalink
She says that she’s going to meet with the teams at the hospitals and consult with them. I say she should head straight to the ER as a patient and experience it first hand.
carswell 08:48 on 2024-04-30 Permalink
Businessperson who narcissisticly wants to run the health care system more like a business appoints narcissistic businessperson to take over his failing efforts to do so.
In a CBC interview, Ms. Biron said she wants to bring new ideas to the table, which is businessperson code for more privatization. And there’s absolutely no way her family’s business, a provider of private medical services, would benefit from that.
When my family doctor went private last September, she sent out a fee schedule ($300 per consultation, $100 per phone call/email, $75 per prescription refill, etc.). What she didn’t bother mentioning is that any services she orders must also be private: the patient also pays for blood tests, MRIs, surgery, post-surgery physiotherapy and so on) while the government pays nothing. No surprise rugged-individualist neoliberal politicians keen to curb government spending love it.
With Biron, Dubé and Legault in charge, we can expect nothing to be done to slow the shift to a two-tier health care system and, especially if the provincial rights Cons win the next federal election, it’s a pretty safe bet the shift is going to accelerate.
steph 11:14 on 2024-04-30 Permalink
I’ve been hearing all the chatter about the new federal capital gains tax being focused on health professionals (doctors) – it actually applies to ALL small businesses despite the field. I predict that our healthcare failings will be blamed wholly on the federal government, despite the fact that it’s been our provincial government who’s been paving the way to privatization for profits by gouging at the public system. I’m calling it, and as usual it’s gross.
jeather 11:28 on 2024-04-30 Permalink
But she pinky swears that the family company, which is currently run by her sister, will have no effect on her thinking, and they won’t talk about it.