Lachine Hospital looked like a consolation prize

To get access to a Quebec cabinet minister, it used to help to know a consulting engineer who would sell you a $1,000 ticket to a Liberal fundraising event.

Now that the Parti Québécois is in power, it helps to know Mario Beaulieu, the spokesman for several antiEnglish pressure groups.

As The Gazette’s Aaron Derfel reported on Thursday, it was Beaulieu alone who persuaded Health Minister Réjean Hébert to order the transfer of the Lachine Hospital from the bilingual McGill hospital system to the local public-health network.

Beaulieu raised the question of the hospital’s language status at a meeting with the minister on modernizing the hospital. He had been invited to the meeting because, the chair of the hospital’s council of doctors, dentists and pharmacists told Derfel, “we wouldn’t have got the meeting without Beaulieu.”

Hébert followed up by issuing the order in a letter Dec. 20 to the director of the Montreal health and social services agency.

He has since been forced to retreat by fierce resistance from francophones.

In a second letter dated Jan. 11, which Derfel obtained, Hébert instructed the agency to hold consultations that will inevitably show overwhelming opposition to the transfer.

But Hébert’s original concession to Beaulieu showed that the PQ was willing to sacrifice even the quality of health care for French-speaking Quebecers to internal political considerations.

By all accounts, conditions at the hospital improved after the McGill University Health Centre took it over in 2008.

As part of the officially bilingual MUHC, the Lachine Hospital was allowed under the French Language Charter to use more English. Still, it continued to serve the French-speaking residents of the West Island in French, as all Quebec hospitals are required to do.

Some francophones even credit the MUHC with saving the 100-year-old hospital, after it was nearly run into the ground under the same government agency to which Hébert would have returned it.

But none of this matters to Beaulieu, in the campaign he has long been waging against the McGill hospital system.

He opposed the construction of the new McGill teaching hospital, and he has had his hawk’s eye on the Lachine Hospital since its transfer to the MUHC was announced.

And none of it mattered to Hébert when he issued his original order, which he justified solely on language grounds.

The Lachine Hospital looked like a consolation prize to the hawks for their disappointment with the “new Bill 101” the Marois government proposed Dec. 5. With Bill 14, the government reneged on its “CEGEPs 101” promise to the hawks to restrict admission to Englishlanguage colleges.

And that promise was to compensate hardline nation- alists for PQ leader Pauline Marois’s refusal to commit to holding a sovereignty referendum.

Now it looks as though Hébert will disappoint the hawks again, by leaving the Lachine Hospital in the MUHC. But that doesn’t mean the end of language politics in the health sector.

One of the objectives of Bill 14 is to restrict access to public services in English at the provincial as well as the municipal level, including the health sector. It’s to stop what the minister responsible for the French Language Charter, Diane De Courcy, has called “slippage toward institutional bilingualism” in areas under Quebec jurisdiction, including the hospitals.

So the proposed legislation would make French the “normal and everyday language” in which the government, its ministries and other public agencies “address others and are addressed.”

The hawks may have lost a battle over the Lachine Hospital. But a PQ war against English in public services, including health, may be only beginning.