Herron: CAQ Cheers as Families Mourn

After feigned outreach and crocodile tears, the government gives itself a round of applause.

Before we get to the infuriating part, here’s a comic by Amanda Di Genova about our ever evolving rapid test guidelines.

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In the end there was no justice for those left to die in the soiled stretchers of Maison Herron.

There had been feigned outrage at news of their deaths. Later, there were even crocodile tears from the ministers whose job it was to keep our elders safe. 

And for the most part, we bought it. We assumed our system was so broken that dozens of people in the same long term care facility could die of COVID-19 and our government would only find out about it in the newspaper. 

After all, reports of the prison-like conditions at Quebec’s elder care facilities go back 30 years and no one seemed to do much about it back then. So why would this government be any different than its Liberal and Parti Québécois predecessors? Call it garden variety incompetence. Awful, yes, but hardly surprising.

That was before things began to unravel.

There were the contradicting versions of who-knew-what-when. First, in public statements that didn’t quite seem to line up and later in testimony before the coroner’s office. 

Then came the smoking gun: a report by Radio-Canada that all but proved the Coalition Avenir Québec has been lying to Quebecers for two years.

In a March 29, 2020 email obtained by the public broadcaster, a deputy minister wrote to the chief of staff for Minister Marguerite Blais — who is responsible for senior care — about an “urgent situation” at Maison Herron. That’s 10 days before Aaron Derfel broke the story in the Montreal Gazette. When a deputy minister sends you an email with the all caps subject line URGENT, you open the email.

This brings us to a question whose answer we may never know.

Did Blais know about Herron and try to cover it up or was her staff so negligent that no one thought to tell her — the minister in charge of seniors — about dozens of dead seniors? Neither scenario bodes well for this government.

We won’t get answers anytime soon because, on Thursday, the CAQ voted down a PQ motion to hold a public inquiry into Herron. In the end, not a single member of the CAQ government voted for justice. Instead, they stood in the National Assembly and cheered. They fucking clapped and smiled at their political victory.

Friends of this government have pointed out that the members were merely giving a send off to Blais and former health Minister Danielle McCann, who was demoted shortly after Herron. You see, the ministers will be retiring ahead of the fall election. They have offered themselves up as sacrifices for the sins of this government (which felt appropriate on the eve of Good Friday).

So these members of our National Assembly applauded because while over 5,000 Quebec seniors have died of COVID in our long term care centres, the CAQ lives to fight another day. Sacrificing two ministers allows them to wash their hands of this calamity.

Theirs is the behaviour of Watergate Burglars, not politicians who swore an oath to serve their constituents. It is typical of a political class that’s gorged itself on power and is stumbling back to the buffet for more. They’re not even pretending to have manners, they just loosened their belts and pulled up a chair to the trough. And unlike the Liberals, who at least waited a few mandates before stuffing their faces, it took the CAQ less than four years to succumb to their basest instincts.

Who knows what a public inquiry into Herron would have uncovered? 

The families of the 47 people who died there deserve to find out. But with the CAQ poised for an easy re-election next fall, it seems we’ll have to wait at least four more years for a reckoning. 

Perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to an admission of guilt from Blais and McCann is their withdrawal from political life. McCann, who will become a grandmother this spring, says she wants to spend more time with her family. And Blais’ retirement spares us the indignity of more half truths and crocodile tears.

I believe in forgiveness and redemption. It is a core tenant of my faith that no one is beyond saving and that, fundamentally, people are good. This government has goodness in it and these ministers have goodness in them. But before they can be redeemed, their must be truth. If not to the public, then at least to themselves, their families or whatever deity they might worship.

I sincerely wish the ministers well and I hope they find meaning in life after politics. Most of all I hope neither of them ever end up in a long term care centre. No one deserves that.

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I was in Quebec City this week trying to figure out why the CAQ is shilling for a European mining corporation. 

Long story short, Glencore has been lobbying the Quebec government for nine years, asking for it to look the other way while they saturate our air with nickel. There are roughly seven times more nickel particles floating in the air above Quebec City’s Limoilou district than is legally permitted in most North American jurisdictions. 

The particles come from the nearby Port of Quebec — where Glencore unloads metal shipments onto train cars bound for its refineries in Sudbury — and on a windy day they are carried into Limoilou.

When I walked along the avenues that line the portside neighbourhood, children played pickup basketball in a laneway, taking in big breaths of carcinogenic air. The CAQ has nothing to gain by keeping metal out of their lungs. So instead of defending the kids and demanding Glencore clean up their act and contain the nickel particles, the CAQ government simply issued a decree proclaiming the air in Limoilou safe.

That’s what’s coming up.

Your Friend,

Chris