The Legault government

On CBC's the National, Quebec Minister of Health Danielle McCann admits that the provinces long term care homes had a large shortage of workers before COVID-19, saying that "we need thousands and thousands of people, not just a few hundred." indicating that then long-term care problem was severe well before this crisis. For a former Parti Quebecois independentiste Minister and now CAQ Premier, who is extremely jealous of provincial jurisdictions, to ask Trudeau for  help from the Canadian military shows how dire the situation is. 

Legault says long-term care homes are facing a shortfall of about 2,000 staff, but that 2,000 medical specialists have offered to step in since his appeal to them Wednesday.

He's also asked the federal government to send trained military personnel to help but says it is still unclear how many people are available. The premier estimated there may be between 60 and 100 qualified people who may be sent as reinforcements.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/covid-19-quebec-april-17-1.5535556

Quebec also seems willing to call the extremely well paid specialists, even though there are "retired nurses are waiting to be called that are more suited to the work than specialsts", according to the CBC National News. Roberto Bomba from the Quebec Nurses Union said, in referring to the specialists, "They better have a knowledge base and run around and care for the residents. But under no circumstances are they to put in requests for nurses. Our nurses are doing the work. They don't have time to babysit specialists." These quotes can be seen at this url (https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1725790275768)

I would also say that the extremely poorly paid residential care attendants don't have time to babysit specialists also. It's another example of elites preferring to use other elites even when they are not the best choice. 

On April 16th Ipolitics reported that in Quebec "70 per cent of the dead lived in CHSLDs or long-term care residences (51 per cent), or other seniors’ residences (19.3 per cent)".  [https://ipolitics.ca/2020/04/16/70-of-quebecs-covid-19-deaths-are-in-lon...

Yesterday, Premier Legault annouced that the number of COVID-19 long term care home deaths had climbed to 80% of Quebec's. Today a chyron (a message scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen) stated the 85% of deaths in Quebec involved those living in long-term care homes. Legault, like Ford in Ontario, has asked for 1,000 more soldiers to aid in the fight against the virus. Beyond the immediate emergency response to this disaster, there has to be an enormous reform of the entire long-term care system that involves better living conditions for residents, as well as better pay, training and working conditions for all workers in the homes. 

On Wednesday the Conseil pour la protection des malades (CPM), which works to protect the rights of patients, filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, alleging "discrimination and exploitation of seniors who live or have lived in a long-term care home (CHSLD) or seniors residence since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis."

On CBC National News last night, the daughter of a resident of a Quebec long-term care home believes her mother died not from Covid-19 but from starvation and dehydration when many of the staff in the home left the job either sick or afraid for their own lives. 

The CPM complaint is calling for an end to the suffering of the elderly. It is also demanding that financial compensation be paid to residents whose right to receive dignified and safe care has allegedly been violated since the beginning of March. ...

The complaint alleges that at the beginning of March, the Quebec government and health authorities should have known that the majority of deaths caused by COVID-19 would involve the elderly based on information available in other countries.

The CPM also contends that the authorities should have known that CHSLDs were most at risk for outbreaks and transmission of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. ...

The organization claims Premier François Legault and the Quebec government only declared that long-term care facilities were their priority in the fight against COVID-19 on April 2. The complaint alleges that the province therefore delayed authorizing and ordering exceptional measures to protect residents.

Paul Brunet, president of the CPM, wrote in the complaint that “thousands of elderly people (…) have been mistreated, neglected, several have died while the government, health authorities, CHSLDs and residences for the elderly have exploited and violated their fundamental rights to the dignity, integrity and security of their person.” ...

The CPM is asking anyone who believes they have suffered from a lack of care and services in a CHSLD since March to contact the organization so that they can be included in the complaint.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6857103/quebec-long-term-care-centres-coronav...

And this guy's at 95% approval?

Legault's approval rating is down to 69% at last poll and should be lower next time there's a poll. 

240,000 people in Quebec have signed a petition against re-opening schools. 

Legautlt is getting more criticism.

 Analysts generally agree the wheels started to come off the bus in this province around the time the horror of Dorval’s Résidence Herron CHSLDbecame public knowledge.

Until then, Quebec seemed to have a decent plan for dealing with the COVID-19pandemic. Locking down the province, closing schools and daycares, pushing social distancing, freeing up 7,000 hospital beds and telling seniors to stay home seemed to be the thing to do.

To this day, Quebec health officials say the decisions taken early in the pandemic helped saved thousands of lives here.

Early on, Premier François Legault earned praise from all sides for his steady, fatherly, things-are-going-to-be-OK tone and decisive management style. It was the same for his gregarious director of public health, Horacio Arruda, who had Quebecers laughing in a tragic time as he talked about recipes for Portuguese pies.

On the night of April 10, reality kicked in when Legault’s crisis team, gathered in the Honoré-Mercier Building housing the premier’s National Assembly office, was told about the scope of the losses — 31 dead at the time — at the Dorval residence.

Legault had been warning all along the virus had to be kept out of such facilities, which house Quebec’s most vulnerable citizens.

“Once this virus enters a seniors’ residence, it’s a little like setting fire to hay,” Legault said on April 23 as his team struggled to control the spread of COVID-19 in hundreds of Quebec’s public and private residences. “Everything burns fast.” And that’s what happened. Suddenly, all seniors’ residences — the weakest link in the health-care system — were under scrutiny. ...

And in the last two weeks, it has become clear unlocking the province is even harder than closing it down.“We were here five days a week … trying to explain,” Legault said this week when asked by the Montreal Gazette about criticism of his crisis management. ...

But the confused messaging has been an issue. On Monday, for example, Legault warned teachers and daycare workers over 60 should not return to work now that Quebec is lifting some elements of its lockdown.

On Wednesday, with no particular explanation, the government sent out Deputy Premier Geneviève Guilbault to say only workers over 70 are at significant risk. 

At the start of the crisis, Arruda decreed grandparents should not be asked to babysit their grandchildren so parents can go back to work. On Thursday, that rule was out the window, too, with Arruda stating those under 70 can babysit under certain conditions. ...

And after saying caregivers wanting to visit CHSLD residents would need to be tested before being admitted, Marguerite Blais, minister for seniors, changed the rule Friday and said it is not necessary to do so.

Legault also preached the advantages of herd immunity, only to drop that concept after it became clear Quebecers took offence.

And with Quebec still short of health-care workers — 11,600 at last count — some have asked why Legault waited so long to call in the army to help at residences. ...

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/analysis-as-covid-19-rages-montr...

cco wrote:

The Gazette is really twisting itself into knots trying to blame Legault for Résidence Herron, since it's run by a convicted drug trafficker and money launderer who got the franchise by delivering a bribe to the PLQ. Looks like they've fallen back on "whatever he did, he should've done it sooner and in English".

The Gazette didn't blame Legault for Herron. You're just making stuff up, I read the Gazette so I know. They didn't blame anyone, they just broke the story and described what was happening.

With more than 60% of Quebec's Covid-19 deaths occurring in long term care homes (LTCs), the military report on this sitation identifies the terrrible conditions that have been allowed to develop in the LTCs. The fact the Legault government is now planning to hire 10,000 additional LTC workers tells everyone how grossly understaffed the homes were. Of course, there would have been no change, if the government could have survived long-term without doing anything. 

A report prepared by the Canadian military about Quebec's long-term care homes says the division between "hot" and "cold" zones, proper use of protective equipment and staffing shortages remain major challenges in the facilities.

The report was shared with the Quebec government Tuesday night and made public this morning, on the heels of a separate, more damning report a day earlier about conditions in Ontario.

The Quebec report provides an account of the conditions in 25 homes where members of the military have been assisting during the pandemic.

In many cases, the military describes how equipment and staffing were inadequate when they arrived but have since improved.

At the Centre d'hébergement Saint-Laurent in Montreal, for example, the report notes some staff weren't properly using protective equipment and were moving between "hot" zones, for those who have tested positive, and "cold" zones, which are supposed to be COVID-free. 

The report said military personnel helped train staff to improve the situation.

Problems in Quebec's long-term care homes, known by their French initials as CHSLDs, have already been well-documented. ...

Workers on the front lines have described chaos inside the homes, including a lack of protective equipment for staff and for residents who had not yet caught the disease. ...

For example, at Vigi Mont-Royal, another Montreal residence, the report notes a shipment of narcotic medications seemed to have disappeared, and care units were short of supplies of some items.

"A lack of medical equipment is often noted during shift changes, and the soldiers had to intervene several times to offer solutions to allow the nursing staff to do their work safely," the report says.

According to the report, there still aren't enough patient attendants, who provide much of the basic care in the homes.

At CHSLD de la Rive, in Laval, the report noted a persistent shortage of staff, saying "most of the people who work at the centre are volunteers with little or no CHSLD experience." ...

More than 1,675 troops have been deployed to long-term care homes in Quebec and Ontario to help with residents' day-to-day needs, to clean the facilities and distribute meals.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-caf-military-report-1.558...

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Quebec's coroner has ordered a public inquiry into the high level of deaths in senior's homes in Quebec. 

Quebec's coroner Pascale Descary has ordered a large-scale public inquiry into the COVID-19 deaths of seniors in the province's long-term care facilities.

The process will be fully public and will allow Quebecers to follow the post mortem into this social issue, the coroner's office said in a statement Wednesday.

As of Tuesday, 3,642 of the nearly 5,300 deaths from COVID-19 in the province occurred within public long-term care facilities (CHSLDs) and another 932 stemmed from private care facilities (RPAs) for seniors; together they account for 86 per cent of COVID-19 deaths in the province.

Nearly three-quarters of those who died from the virus in Quebec were over age 80 and 92 per cent were over 70 years old.

A coroner and lawyer Géhane Kamel have been appointed to preside over the inquiry. Kamel has already been tasked with investigating the deaths at Herron Residence in Dorval, which will form the basis of the investigation.

A coroner with medical training, Dr. Jacques Ramsay, will be appointed to assist Kamel due to the complexity of the subject and the large number of deaths, the coroner's office said.

"It is important to remember that coroners intervene in cases of violent, obscure or deaths that could be linked to negligence. Deaths outside these (parameters), including those that result solely from a coronavirus infection, are not investigated by the coroners," the coroner's office said in its statement.

Kamel and her team will look at deaths in several types of residences and in several regions in order to paint a representative portrait of the situation at the provincial level. 

To be analyzed as part of the investigation, the deaths must meet the following criteria:

•  the death occurred while the person was living in a CHSLD, an RPA or a home for vulnerable people or people losing their autonomy (RI)
•  the death occurred during the period from March 12 to May 1, 2020
•  the death was communicated to the coroner because of its violent or obscure nature or because it is possibly linked to negligence. 

Kamel will be tasked with making recommendations into the matter "to avoid further deaths and protect human life," the coroner's office stated, adding that details of this investigation and the date of the first hearings will be released at a later time.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebec-coroner-orders-public-inquiry-into-co...

If there are no Indigenous people in the National Assembly, it is essential that the task force include First Nations and Inuit representatives, from Indigenous organisations or civil society. And today is National Indigenous Peoples' Day.

There is a lot of police violence against Indigenous people. Perhaps it is less visible to people in cities as much of it occurs in remote regions, but it is a constant concern for First Nations and Inuit people here. One group that faces particular dangers not only from the police but from other men is homeless or precariously housed women from Northern Québec, (Inuit, Eastern Cree etc) who have fled domestic violence in their home regions.

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/macpherson-just-dont-call-it-a-committee-on-systemic-discrimination

"The “laicity” law forbids newly hired teachers and certain other government employees from wearing religious symbols on duty.

While its defenders argue that it applies equally to symbols of all religions, in reality it disproportionately affects Muslim women who wear the head covering called the hijab.

The legislation even includes an admission that it is discriminatory, in the form of “notwithstanding” clauses overriding the protections against discrimination in the Quebec as well as the Canadian charters of rights."

Well, it deliberately affects Sikh people as well.

I don't feel comfortable attacking Quebec on this. I have enough racist shit here in Saskatchewan that I don't need to deflect and point fingers at Quebec. And yes, as a western Canadian, we have played a role in our racism and hatred against francophones living in Quebec and elsewhere. I do not feel that it is my place to be addressing this issue. It comes across as me deflecting onto Quebec what isn't happening in my own back yard.

I don't speak French so I am limited in my resources to get a clear idea of the street reaction to what is happening with white politicians denying and minimizing systemic racism, saying that racist deniers are nice people, and that they are genuinely serious in wanting to eradicate racism from their institutions which does not appear to be sincere.  I wish I had a better grasp of the local grassroots reaction to what is going on in Quebec right now.

The Quebec government invoked the notwithstanding clause in order to enact their secularism law. They know that there is systemic discrimination within their institutions.

Where is the outrage?!? Or is there any significant outrage aside from the small number of civil liberty proponents outside of the minority communities affected?

I am going to say no more.

My comment does not belong in the Legault thread but I am a white person who lives in an unassuming small city in Saskatchewan. I am a taxi driver who has had to call the police from time to time for help.

I honestly thought that I was a human being until I dealt with our local police detachment. In my many encounters with them I can recall a few positive experiences but the rest left me feeling angry, humiliated, dehumanized, and or violated. I know that First Nations, black, and people of colour face much much worse. I don't know how they do it.

I think the point was that they know that their secular law is a form of systemic discrimination. They have said outright that there is no systemic discrimination in Quebec knowing full well that if they invoke the notwithstanding clause to override charter protections that they are knowingly and deliberately systemically discriminating against others with their legislation. They are not saying that they feel that their  secularism law is a justifiable and necessary form discrimination for whatever reason they wish to give, they are claiming that virtually none exists except for little traces here and there which need to be weeded out.

Because of this claim they hould have had no problem in unanimously consenting to reform systemic discrimination within the RCMP across Canada.

I learned in high school that things were just awful for francophones. People from the rural communities would move to Montreal to look for work. They didn't speak English and lacked the education courses to get office jobs. They were hired as taxi drivers, domestic housekeepers, janitors, and other low income jobs. They were the majority yet they were the lowest socioeconomic demographic in their own province. The influence of American television programming was also working to erode the French language. I don't know and many western Canadians cannot possibly know or grasp how extreme the oppression was against the French.

Last year I had two separatr instances where I chatted with someone from down east with a French last name. I asked if they were from Quebec. Both of them had a family story that was similar: their father was originally from Quebec and spoke French. Their father's family moved from Quebec to Ontario for work when their father was in grade school.  Their father was beaten and pulverized in school for being French to the point where he refused to ever speak French again. Therefore their father never taught them to speak French because he was too ashamed. 
 

There are a lot of French people in western  Canada who do not know how to speak French. In my small town there are a few well established French families. They were never harassed like those stories I heard about from growing up in Ontario and they never spoke French either. Their great grandfather spoke French fluently. Their grandfather knew some French. The next generation could speak a few words and didn't really identify as being French either. By that time,  being French just meant having a French last name.

Both of these scenarios are very bad. No one should be harassed and bullied for being French. It speaks to the vilest and darkest horrors of our racist past imaginable.

The second group is another disaster. Being French is more than simply having a French last name while living as an English  person in western Canada. Something is seriously lost with people nicely and pleasantly assimilating as though nothing is wrong.

I know very little about Quebec and it's history. From my limited awareness, it is obvious and clear to me that Law 101 was both necessary and just.

Europeans learn to speak many languages in school. Canadians fight over having to learn just two. This does not speak well for us.

Pondering, do you feel that English Canada is ultimately responsible since had they not been racist And oppressive that francophones wouldn't need to feel so protective and fearful of losing their culture and language?

Although Legault and Trudeau allowed those asylum seekers who worked in long term care homes and hospitals to have a route to permanent resdiency they did not even given that to security guards at these places. 

Doll Jean Frejus Nguessan Bi says he couldn’t sleep at all last night.

The asylum seeker from Ivory Coast works as a security guard in hospitals and long-term care homes in the Montreal area, where he watched many of his colleagues stop coming in as deaths linked to COVID-19 began to mount this spring.

But while Nguessan Bi kept working, he said he found out Friday that he would be excluded from a new government program to fast-track the permanent residency applications of some asylum seekers working on the front lines during the pandemic.

“Why (not) us? We who gave our hearts and our love… Why are we abandoned?” he said in an interview at a protest camp across the street from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Montreal riding office Saturday. “What did we do to deserve this?” ...

Ottawa announced Friday that asylum seekers working in specific jobs in the health-care sector would be eligible for permanent residency without first having to wait for their asylum claims to be accepted, as is typically the process. ...

But asylum seekers and their supporters say Ottawa’s plan excludes thousands of workers without permanent status in Canada who have laboured on the front lines during the pandemic, often at great personal risk to themselves and their families. ...

That includes security guards and janitorial staff, factory workers, and farm labourers, among others.

“I have friends who worked with me in security that abandoned (their posts) because they were afraid of getting infected. But I stayed,” said Nguessan Bi.

He said he wants Trudeau and Quebec Premier Francois Legault to do something to help asylum seekers who are not eligible for the new program.

Several dozen people rallied in front of Trudeau’s office on Saturday to demand permanent residency for all asylum seekers. ...

“It’s an act of recognition. They deserve status,” Joseph Clormeus, a member of Debout pour la dignite, a Montreal advocacy group that organized the rally, told the crowd.

Anite Presume, a Haitian asylum seeker who came to Quebec in August 2017 from the United States, was among the protesters.

She works in a medication factory, and said she kept working during the pandemic despite the risks.

“To take the bus, we were all stressed, but we still went to work because it was essential. They needed medication for the hospitals,” she said in an interview.

She said she has not received a response yet to her application for asylum in Canada, and lives under a cloud of uncertainty and stress about her future.

“It’s a feeling of rejection,” Presume said, about not being included in Ottawa’s regularization program. “They rejected us as if we did nothing.”

The program was the result of negotiations between the federal government and Quebec, who have had a strained relationship on the question of immigration, and in particular the asylum claimants, in recent years.

Public support has been building for asylum seekers’ demand for permanent residency after it was revealed that refugee claimants were among those toiling in Quebec’s long-term care facilities, which were hard-hit by COVID-19.

https://chatnewstoday.ca/2020/08/15/why-not-us-asylum-seekers-on-covid-1...

pietro_bcc wrote:

I don't know why you're including Trudeau in your criticism of the criteria being too narrow, when its universally agreed upon that Trudeau wanted more broad eligibility criteria but Legault said no because he believed that it would cause more people to seek asylum.

Even when he wants more he too readily settles for less IMO, probably because he is usually about the grand gesture rather than the result.

Some posters would deny the national oppression of people in countries south of the US, due to the attested repression and in some cases utter genocide of Indigenous peoples from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. That is useless. There has been an increasing awareness of these evils among activists in all those countries, and also up here in Québec. We have to build solidarity between Indigenous peoples and others who are at least in part settlers against imperialism and colonisation throughout the Americas. And not deny the self-determination either of Indigenous peoples or of Latin speakers from Québec to Patagonia.

I loathe the CAQ. There are governments just as loathsome much farther south, in particular Bolsonaro in Brazil.

I'm completely perplexed as to how François Legault remains popular and how a majority of Francophones think he did a good job during the pandemic.

We have by far the highest COVID infection numbers in Canada, have among the highest rates of death per capita in North America and have had unclear decision making and communications since the start. Can someone please explain to me how François Legault did a good job with COVID-19? I genuinely want to understand how someone could come to that conclusion.

The Quebec Superior Court has ruled that "Quebec's secularism law violates the basic rights of religious minorities in the province, but those violations are permissible because of the Constitution's notwithstanding clause".  However the decision  "also declared that the most contentious parts of the law — the religious symbols ban for many government employees — can't be applied to English schools" because the rights of English school boards are protected by the the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because section 23 is not covered by the notwithstanding clause.

This kind of decision shows how truly absurd the discrimnatory nature of the law is. People should be allowed to practice their religion, including the wearing of visible religious articles or to have no religion. Having one religious group protected by the law is of course discriminatory in itself.  When it comes to discrimination one should never mistake the law for justice. All rights need to be protected, meaning there should be no notwithstanding clause. 

A system where free speech, religious freedom and gender equality can be violated through the notwithstanding clause but a minority school system of any persuasion is protected from the notwithstanding clause is absurd. Already some religious people who wear religious garb have been forced to leave the province to find work. 

Quebec's secularism law violates the basic rights of religious minorities in the province, but those violations are permissible because of the Constitution's notwithstanding clause, a Superior Court judge ruled on Tuesday.

But the ruling by Justice Marc-André Blanchard also declared that the most contentious parts of the law — the religious symbols ban for many government employees — can't be applied to English schools.

The desire of English school boards to foster diversity by choosing who they hire is protected by the minority-language education rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Blanchard said in his decision. Crucially, that section of the charter (23) is not covered by the notwithstanding clause.

Not long after the decision was handed down, Quebec Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, the architect of Bill 21, said the province plans to appeal. He said the court's decision to exempt English schools threatens to divide the province along linguistic lines and create two categories of Quebecers. "We don't agree with the judgment," he said. "We need to keep united in Quebec, and all the laws that are adopted here at the National Assembly have to apply to everyone." ...

Other than the decision regarding English schools, the judgment largely left the law intact. It was facing four separate legal challenges, each containing several different arguments about why the law is unconstitutional. ...

Civil liberties groups, including the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, began filing lawsuits against Bill 21 as soon as it was passed. 

In passing the law, the Quebec government invoked the notwithstanding clause, meaning the law couldn't be challenged on the grounds that it violated basic rights contained in sections 2 and 7 through 15 of the charter. These sections contain safeguards for free speech, religious freedom and gender equality.

A protest was quickly organized Monday in downtown Montreal to denounce the law, and call for it to be struck down in its entirety. ...

The ruling represented a victory for English school boards, who have been outspoken against the law even as they fight for their very existence in a separate battle over the province's education reforms. 

The English Montreal School Board, which brought forward one of the challenges against Bill 21, said in a statement it was "elated" with the decision to exempt English-language boards.

"We value the diversity of our students and staff and respect their personal and religious rights, which are guaranteed both by the Canadian and Quebec Charters of Rights," said board chair Joe Ortona.

In a statement of its own, the Dorval-based Lester B. Pearson School Board, another English board, said the ruling would go "a long way in terms of ensuring religious freedom can continue" in its different schools and centres.

But teacher Amrit Kaur, a Sikh woman from Montreal who wears a turban (dastar), described the ruling as "bittersweet." During the trial last November, Kaur told the court she was forced to take a teaching job in British Columbia after she finished her education degree in 2019.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-21-religious-symbols-ban-qu...