EDITORIAL

Barrette’s excuses

 

Front page headline, Le Droit, March 16, 2016:  “BARRETTE PRÉSENTE SES EXCUSES”.   Big news!  Barrette is Québec’s minister of health, Gaétan Barrette. His “excuses” translate to “apologies” in English.  Dr Barrette has presided over the present massacre of the province’s health-care system. “Massacre” is here a technical term.

There have been innumerable calls for the minister’s resignation. Here in the Outaouais, Quebec has forcibly amalgamated the health-care networks of Wakefield, Buckingham, and the Pontiac into Gatineau’s morass.  Gatineau’s two hospitals have consistently ranked near the bottom of the province’s hospitals, so who would have predicted that Gatineau’s bureaucracy would be given even more powers and more jurisdiction?  No one -- Quebec has barely completed decentralizing health-care management, and now it’s all being centralized, under Gatineau.  This reform has been managed by Minister Barrette.

To be fair, it has been rumoured that, once Quebec can amalgamate the long-term debts of the regional networks into one big debt, the process will go into reverse and we’ll be spun off again. Except that our rural networks will now be shouldering part of Gatineau city’s massive debt.  This exercise, says at least one health-system professional, is all about freeing Gatineau from its debt and spreading it across the region.  Presumably, there is a logic to this, although there certainly is no decency in it.

The result has been, basically, no remedy for health-care itself, but an extension of long wait-times, shortage of doctors and nurses, huge shortages of specialists, lack of equipment (ultrasound!), on and on.

 

So, to get back to Le Droit’s headline, Dr Barrette and his apologies, one reads into the article, wondering to whom the minister is apologizing and for what, exactly? 

No doubt his apologies go out to all the sick and injured who are waiting, and waiting, and waiting for their care.  Certainly, he is apologizing to those taxpayers who live in the rural areas and who now must travel further and wait longer for their care.  An apology to the citizens of the Pontiac . . . those in the Gatineau Hills . . .  in Papineauville’s villages . . . who fundraised for equipment, recruited doctors, and donated,  and who now must  start over at square one. Certainly they deserve an apology.

And he’d be apologizing to the Gatineau city residents who must drive as far as Fort Coulonge for emergency care – when once they drove across to Ontario for a quarter of the wait times at home?

He would no doubt also apologize to the doctors and nurses for putting them into this untenable situation, the GMFs, as well as apologizing to their office staffs, the back-up and other professionals that are all part of health-care. They all, over-worked and over-managed, deserve the minister’s apology.

Oh . . .  I see . . . I see . . .

My mistake. Minister Barrette is apologizing for losing his temper with another politician. A female deputy.  What a gentlemen, this minister.