A train derailment west of town disrupted the Vaudreuil-Hudson Exo line from Wednesday morning, and a suspicious package scare caused the closure of one of the two runways at Trudeau most of the day, followed by the arrest of two suspects; the airport is operating normally again although with some inconveniences due to delayed flights. CF-18s escorted two inbound flights from concern about security.
Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital sustained a major computer outage all day Wednesday, meaning a chaotic return to paper records.*
* I wonder how far this medical outage extended. I had a routine blood test at a CLSC Wednesday afternoon, a process that’s never been confused in the past, but this time the staff were obviously having difficulties figuring out who was there for what. Eventually a technician just called out “Who’s here for blood tests? Follow me!” and we did. Nobody seemed to know what was going on.
Nicholas 22:23 on 2026-03-18 Permalink
Seems the whole CIUSSS de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal was affected somewhat, which includes CLSCs. Were you east of a line from Plateau train tracks to D’Iberville to the Met to Papineau?
Kate 22:32 on 2026-03-18 Permalink
I was at the CLSC de la Petite-Patrie (they had open appointments, although it’s not closest to me), which I gather is under the CIUSSS du Nord-de-l’Île-de-Montréal. It’s next to Beaubien metro.
PatrickC 09:17 on 2026-03-19 Permalink
A computer shutdown at a hospital ER is a major plotline in this season of the TV show “The Pitt.” One of the jokes is that someone brings out a fax machine from storage and only the old timers have ever seen one. But didn’t I read not so long ago that in Quebec hospitals fax machines were still being used on a regular basis? Or is my memory playing tricks?
Ian 10:00 on 2026-03-19 Permalink
No, until recently hospitals weren’t allowed to use anything but fax as it was considered more secure in terms of privacy and data protection. They weren’t wrong, but still.
Bert 10:22 on 2026-03-19 Permalink
They ARE wrong. Security by obscurity is not a thing. the data on the phone line is a pure unencrypted TIF file. 99.99% of email today is encrypted basically end-to-end. Further email adds authentication, who actually sent / received the communication. Add to that all the auditing and data loss prevention abilities.
Who sent the fax? No idea, caller ID can be spoofed, the header line of the fax can be faked. Who received the fax? No idea, it goes basically to a shared paper inbox. Proof of delivery, that little slip?
Hospital fax requirement is only still around to keep end users at best beholden to intermediaries, such as pharmacies. Your records are already in an electronic medical record system. Why should the 300 or 600 dpi x-ray of my broken leg (hypothetical) get downscaled to 200 by 100 dpi?
I understand that doctors or the hospital staff don’t want to get bombarded by questions, “my leg hurts, what do I do?” but this sort of thing can be mitigated. But service providers should be held to account whenever possible.
Joey 13:09 on 2026-03-19 Permalink
Why do we still have fax? Because it’s not just the fax machine that needs to be replaced – the entire electronic health record system has to be developed, and funded (including funding for health professionals like doctors to use it). Could you replace fax transmissions with something better (cheaper, faster, easier, more secure)? You sure could, easily even, if it was a one-off change. But if that change effectively triggers a reimagining of how all healthcare data is treated, suddenly it’s a much larger project.
Kevin 15:19 on 2026-03-19 Permalink
An issue with system changes is that, in my experience, they get selected by people who don’t ever use the systems involved, and then tested by incompetent people.
Sales people pitch to managers who don’t use the tech, who then survey some employees about what is needed… but the people best suited to test the systems, provide advice and make those decisions are generally very competent. A manager doesn’t want to pull them off their task because you’d need several people to replace them, therefore they give the testing duty to the employee who is so useless they don’t even need to be replaced
Then the system gets chosen, and it invariably does not effectively do what the sales people promised it could do, and we end up with kludgy workarounds.
All because some manager doesn’t want to give a competent person time to play with a test system and come up with reasons to reject it.