Gisèle Lalonde led the fight to save the Montfort
Gisèle Lalonde led fight to save the Montfort
There are five words Gisèle Lalonde will forever remember hearing on the radio that day in 1997. Five words that would trigger the fight of her life.
“Hôpital Montfort will be closed.”
Sprightly and irrepressible, Lalonde would soon spearhead a five-year struggle to force the Ontario government to rescind its plan to shutter the only Frenchlanguage hospital and academic health institution west of Quebec. It was a battle for francophone rights that had to be fought.
Saving the cherished medical centre wasn’t easy, recalls Lalonde today. Thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless late nights were part of the effort. But 20 years later, there’s still a certain twinkle in her eye as she looks back on her time leading “S.O.S. Montfort” rallies, demonstrations and court battles.
“We worked so hard, you’d never believe. Especially those first 14 months, it was incredible. I was exhausted at times,” she says, and then smiles.
From the very beginning, Lalonde was a fighter. As a child, she battled illness: double pneumonia, whooping cough and pulmonary inflammation, then a nasty bout of measles. Kids at school nicknamed her “Skinny” for her slight, puny build.
But she was also always full of energy. Now, 83 years old and still living in Vanier, she is as energetic — and talkative — as ever.
Growing up in what was then called Eastview, Lalonde spent her days helping in her mother’s restaurant: In between scooping five-cent ice cream cones, she’d do homework in the back corner booth. By 10 years old, she’d skipped three years at school and was already in Grade 8.
After graduating, she returned to the classroom as a teacher, but her political ambitions quickly took over her teaching career. Unimpressed by the candidates running as school board trustees in Eastview in 1965, she threw her own hat in the ring. And she won.
No woman had ever been elected in Eastview — not to the school board or the city council — and despite her thick skin, gender would play a frustrating role in Lalonde’s political career. At one memorable meeting with trustees from other school boards, she says her male colleagues clapped patronizingly after every speech she made and question she asked.
“Every time I’d get up, they’d clap. Every time I’d speak, they’d clap,” she says. “I said, ‘I listen to you, I’m a trustee like you, I don’t need to be clapped for more than you, I’m no different than you. So, that’s enough.’ ”
In 1977, after a stint as executive director of the Ottawa-based Centre franco-ontarien de ressources pédagogiques, a francophone teachers’ resource centre Lalonde founded and considers her proudest achievement, she ran provincially for the Progressive Conservatives in Ottawa-East.
Lalonde says while her views didn’t align with the party, she was conscious of the diminished voice francophones had in provincial politics. With the Tories then in power for decades and Franco-Ontarians consistently voting Liberal, she says, “we didn’t have anyone to go and speak for us.
“I said, ‘If I run, I’ll be close to them. I’ll get to meet them, I’ll get to know them.’ And there weren’t any francophones who could do that at the time, so I did it.”
In the end, Lalonde lost the election, but succeeded at what she’d set out to do: getting to know and earning the trust of people in power at Queen’s Park. It paid off. Before becoming Vanier mayor in 1985, she served on several highlevel provincial committees and was the (Conservative) premier’s adviser on francophone issues.
It was, however, Lalonde’s herculean effort to save Montfort Hospital that gained her a national recognition — and practically deified her in the eyes of many Ottawa francophones.
In 1997, with the Mike Harris Tory government trying to slash health-care costs and streamline medical services, Montfort was one of several hospitals slated for closure. Across Ontario, many others were also being amalgamated, restructured or shuttered.
But Montfort was — and remains — more than just a medical centre for Franco- Ontarians, says hospital president Luc Bédard. Beyond bricks and mortar, it was one of Ontario francophones’ few and most prized cultural and educational institutions, a fact Lalonde continually struggled to impress upon the provincial government, which saw Montfort as just another hospital among the many it was preparing to reorganize.
Opened in 1953 after extensive lobbying and fundraising efforts by Eastview’s political and religious elite, Montfort had delivered thousands of Franco- Ontarians’ babies, treated the sick and elderly, and churned out generations of new francophone nurses, technicians and doctors. With that shared history came a shared sense of ownership over the hospital, Lalonde says.
“We had to demonstrate from the beginning that we were with the hospital and that we wouldn’t let it be taken away,” Lalonde says. “To make ourselves heard, we had to fight from here. And Toronto would listen because we’d fight so hard they’d hear the noise in Toronto.”
With about three weeks’ notice and zero planning, Lalonde booked the former Civic Centre (now the TD Place Arena), promising the government she would fill the sporting venue with 10,000 Montfort supporters. She says she was terrified she wouldn’t pull it off, but the crowds poured in anyway.
“Without Gisèle’s persistence and organizational skills, we wouldn’t have won that battle,” says Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, who remembers Lalonde’s heartfelt speech at the rally before a human sea of green and white — the Franco-Ontarian colours. “I don’t think (the government) understood what a dynamo Gisèle Lalonde was and is.”
That rally was just the beginning of a years-long war Lalonde waged against the Ontario government. After innumerable interviews, demonstrations and negotiations over the hospital, several francophone groups eventually took the province to court, winning at the lower and appeal court levels. In the face of that combined campaign, Queen’s Park finally decided in 2002 not to appeal the rulings to the Supreme Court of Canada. Montfort was saved.
In her memoir, Jusqu’au bout! (Until the End!), Lalonde says that during the five-year struggle, she lived off adrenalin and spent her energy, money and health fighting for the hospital. The protracted battle led to significant health problems for her near the end of the S.O.S. campaign, and two bouts of depression afterward.
Lalonde’s son, André, says his mother often worries about who will take up the mantle for the next generation of Franco-Ontarians. “Mme Montfort,” a veritable symbol of francophone resistance in Ottawa, admits she doesn’t know who it will be.
Then again, leaders — such as Lalonde — come in all shapes and sizes, Watson reminds us.
“Small in physical stature,” he says. “But a giant among the francophone community.”