July 20, 1997

Too many bilingual hospitals?

by Azana Endicott, The Gazette


English-language activists and physicians reacted with disgust yesterday to Deputy Premier Bernard Landry's diagnosis that too many hospitals and CLSCs are bilingual.

Michael Hamelin, president of Alliance Quebec, said Landry's meddling is pathetic. "Landry can't seem to accept that it's good to speak more than one language."

In an interview published yesterday in Le Devoir, Landry, reacting to a Health Department report that bilingualism is fast becoming the norm in Quebec health-care institutions, said the cabinet will act quickly to put the brakes on the spread of bilingualism in the health and social-service network.

Landry added that the number of health-care institutions designated as bilingual must be reviewed from top to bottom, the report said.

The situation is "totally unacceptable," Landry said. "The number of bilingual establishments has absolutely no relationship to the real needs of the anglophone minority. This has made us more vigilant."

The Parti Québécois government must take a more hard-line stand to limit the number of institutions that provide English-language services, he said. "The proportions are wrong."

The comments come at a time when regional-access plans for English-language health care are under review by the government. A decision is expected by late August or September.

Yesterday, Landry did not return calls seeking clarification of his remarks.

Hamelin observed that the regional health councils, which govern hospitals and CLSCs, aren't complaining that there's a surplus of bilingual institutions. Their language-access plans have already been assessed by experts in the health-care field, he said.

Bilingual health-care institutions are already feeling the heat from the Office de la Langue Française.

In a July 14 letter to the 69 health institutions in the province with bilingual status, the Office served notice that they must be able at all times to provide service in French.

And the language board has called a meeting for Sept. 17 to review those institutions' levels of French service.

A surgeon who works at the Jewish General Hospital and the Montreal Children's Hospital called Landry's remarks "outlandish, illogical and infuriating."

"It's a very beautiful thing in Quebec that most of us will switch interchangeably from English to French," Dr. Jack Rothstein said.

The provincial government should not put even a nickel of public funding into the Office de la Langue Française to curtail bilingual services, Rothstein said.

Funding cutbacks have created a crisis in the hospital system, Rothstein said.

The millions of dollars the Quebec government is spending on regulating language should go toward cutting down on waiting time for medical procedures, he said.

"We certainly don't need any more restrictions on language."

He called Landry's remarks "an affront to all the people who are on long waiting lists."

Doctors and nurses care more about treating the patient than they do about language politics, he said.

"We've always made every effort to communicate well with the patients, whether they speak Italian or Greek or Japanese," he said.

But severe funding cutbacks and increasingly strict language laws have created a situation that prevents doctors from treating patients the way they were taught to, he said.

"It makes physicians think maybe we should go elsewhere and practice medicine the way we were taught we should," he said.

Keith Henderson, the leader of the Equality Party, called Landry's comments "frighteningly ludicrous. We've lived in a climate of relative tolerance and openness for decades," he said. "And now (the Parti Québécois) is trying to bring us down."

By reducing access to bilingual health services, Quebec could be forcing hospital staff to address English-speaking patients in French, and that would be legislated impoliteness, he said.

"Landry is in a position of power. He can force people with open minds and good hearts to act in a churlish manner," Henderson said.

"No wonder (English-rights activist Howard) Galganov decided he would leave. This is the sort of behaviour that urges people to say, 'Look, we can't put up with this any more.' "

The federal government has a responsibility to step in to protect the English minority, he said. "The federal government is abandoning one territory after the other. The federal government has to quit pretending that the provinces are totally sovereign."


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