February 8, 2023

2023 got off to a flying start! The health network is turned upside down and you, the healthcare professionals, are doing your best to keep your heads above water.

How did successive governments let things get so bad? Why wasn’t something done to avoid being in such a precarious situation throughout the health network? Emergency rooms have been in the news for several months, but we know that all institutions are burning up. As we often say: when the emergency room coughs, the whole hospital catches a cold!

This being said, there is no point in blaming Peter, John or James for all the ills. Healthcare professionals are calling for concrete actions to turn things around. The Coalition Avenir Québec government has been at the helm for more than four years and it is clear that it is getting worse. And unfortunately, one gets the distinct impression that the CAQ ministers seem to be more concerned with their public image and their Twitter account than with the state of public services, including health care.

Healthcare professionals don’t need staging, polished photos or the 280 characters on Health Minister Christian Dubé’s Twitter account. They want their demands heard. For several months now, healthcare professionals have been mobilizing, in the open, to reclaim their professional and personal lives, regain their rights and demanding be respected!

And they don’t just do it for themselves! They dare to defy the ever-present code of silence in the health network, also for the sake of their patients. They are refusing to continue working in the current conditions. Independent labour is sucking the life out of the public network more than ever, mandatory overtime is pervasive and the workload resulting from inadequate healthcare professional-to-patient ratios is inhumane. It is clearly increasingly difficult to provide quality, safe care to the population.

François Legault’s government has already started to play the famous negotiation tape. As if the healthcare professionals’ demands were the expression of pressure tactics related to this negotiation that is beginning for the renewal of the collective agreement. What nerve! Negotiations or not, the healthcare professionals are mobilizing because they have gotten to that point!

I invite this government to look up from its social media and see the full extent of the demands of nurses, licensed practical nurses, respiratory therapists and clinical perfusionists. And by the way, we also have a negotiation where we are making these very demands.