Not everyone’s happy with hospital transfer

Take a walk around the Ste-Anne’s Hospital. There’s no doubt: Ste-Anne’s Hospital is now a provincial facility. It’s no longer a federal institution set aside for veterans.

Now all of Canada’s 18 veterans hospitals are part of history.

Right now in Ste-Anne, there are five floors of veterans and five floors for civilians. When the veterans are dead, when all those soldiers who fought for Canada in the Second World War and the Korean War have passed on, that will signal the end of federal military hospitals. The federal government may retain facilities for its operational stress services for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) victims, but a nurse told me that only means 10 beds.

Only Second World War and Korean War veterans benefit from the long-term care guarantees from the federal government. Post-Korean War veterans don’t have the lifetime guarantees granted to earlier warriors.

When those old soldiers are gone, a 100 years of history, reaching back to late in the First World War, with wounded veterans being shipped in on trains to be treated at the new military hospital on the grounds of Macdonald College farm, will come to an end.

It will be just another Quebec hospital with a Quebec collective agreement to govern working conditions. The next generation of hospital workers won’t have a clue what the old hospital was like.

In the meantime, the federal government has spent millions creating a beautiful interior with, by the way, magnificent views of McGill University’s MacDonald campus and John Abbott College from the main tower. It really is a classy place to fade out of life. The federal government certainly honoured its commitment to its veterans in terms of the space it left in this now-provincial institution.

But what about the rest of the story, the services the veterans received in the old hospital? April 1 will mark the first anniversary of the transfer that shifted the hospital to the province. How has the first year worked out for the veterans?

Lt. (Ret’d) Wolf William Solkin is 94. You wouldn’t think so from the way he writes, talks and remembers. Talking to Solkin is like talking to a contemporary. There is no memory confusion. His mobility may be a problem but he has an electric wheelchair in which he glides around his open-plan hospital home. His mind is still firmly in control of the situation.

And he’s not happy with the outcome of the transfer for veterans. “April Fool’s Day,’” he points out, the date of the transfer last year: “And who were the fools? We were. We should have seen it coming. Someone should have seen it coming.”

To say that Solkin is a contrarian is a serious understatement. He has had a long and distinguished career as an independent thinker and communicator. But he acknowledges that the federal government thought they were honouring their promises about supplying the same level and quality of service to the remaining Second World War and Korean veterans. They just failed.

“You keep trying,” he tells hospital officials, “and we keep dying.” His wit bites.

“This was supposed to be a seamless transition,” he explains. “We heard that all over. They were going to create a twotier system until we were kind enough to disappear. The federal government made an agreement to pay a per diem per veteran for extra services. There was to be no change in service levels for us. Turns out that they were all platitudinous promises from Veterans Affairs Canada. What does the per diem payment buy? And who’s to make sure that it doesn’t slide into some other hospital account.”

According to Solkin, it hasn’t worked out. And for one simple reason: the staff changed. No one realized how important was the old staff, the people who appreciated the generosity of the old collective agreement, the flexibility of the old regime. At the time of the transfer, there was a mass exodus of experienced staff who were familiar with veteran culture. Given the threat of a 30 per cent decrease in pay and a reduction of other benefits in the federal collective agreement, a large number of the old staff took their pensions and retired. And new staff coming in are under a new inferior collective agreement with none of the old perks. And training for the job is obviously not working. And do they even have enough staff ?

“Staff made more money, had perks, didn’t mind coming in from a distance, were bi-lingual, familiar with our veteran culture. Now there’s way less staff and they’re more than likely to be weak in English,” Solkin says.

Is there anything to be done. The retired lieutenant has some ideas but thinks no one is listening. “We’re just in the way here.”

This was supposed to be a seamless transition. We heard that all over. They were going to create a twotier system until we were kind enough to disappear. LT. (RET’D) WOLF WILLIAM SOLKIN