Toula Drimonis: No matter their language, sick Quebecers need compassion, not confusion

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A little over a decade ago, I read about Hélène Tremblay Lavoie, a bilingual francophone living in Toronto whose dementia made her lose her ability to speak English. As her neurodegenerative disease progressed, the second language she had spoken for more than 30 years became incomprehensible to her (common among dementia patients).  

With only her French remaining, her daughter Sylvie struggled to find her long-term care and eventually placed her in a French-speaking institution more than 100 kilometres away, making the long round trip to visit her for months near the end of Tremblay Lavoie’s life.  

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Sylvie later created a foundation to help address a critical lack of long-term care for francophones in the Toronto area. While access to health-care services in French across Canada is available, it’s often scattered and inequitable, and in some areas it’s non-existent. Provincial governments should be working to eliminate such sad stories, not replicate them.  

When Tremblay Lavoie’s case made headlines, I remember thinking how terribly isolating and destabilizing it must be to lose your ability to communicate and have a health-care system unable to meet your needs. Many vulnerable patients would be lost without family to advocate for them in our increasingly hard-to-navigate system. Many are lost. For the quarter of Canada’s population with a first language other than English or French, the roadblocks are even more plentiful. They, too, deserve dignified health care. 

Fast-forward a decade and it was my turn to find myself in a clinic with my aging mother as she took a memory test — one of many — before eventually being diagnosed with dementia. After a series of questions left my trilingual mother stumped and anxious, the French-speaking specialist prompted me to ask them in Greek. She understood it was a memory test, not a language test. Communication was the goal. 

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As I looked at images of Italian Quebecers gathered in front of Santa Cabrini Hospital last weekend to protest a visit to their community’s facility by the Office québécois de la langue française — and new government directives for bilingual health-care access that have been denounced as potentially dangerous by advocates for the anglophone community — I saw first-generation immigrant seniors like my Greek parents, who arrived in the ’60s and ’70s and spent a lifetime toiling in Montreal’s textile and manufacturing factories and in construction. These mostly English-speaking nonnas and nonnos contributed to this city and province, too. They shouldn’t have to be out there protesting a government that’s treating their health and peace of mind as collateral damage in its war against English.  

Instead of our government working to ensure all Quebecers can access better care in our overburdened, understaffed system, it has created unnecessary confusion and anxiety for linguistic minorities and health-care workers. It’s pointlessly petty. 

Quebec’s French-speaking majority — and francophone minorities in Canada — should be able to access health care in their language. So should everyone else. With wait times to see medical specialists in Quebec having doubled since before the pandemic, how does placing more hurdles and communication barriers between patients and health-care workers help anyone — or protect French?   

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Sick people need help. Legislation aiming to protect French should never — under any circumstances — undermine, hinder or complicate someone’s access to quality care in the language of their choice. Bill 96 appears to do all three.  

When people are ill and vulnerable, aging or dying, they need care and compassion, not confusion and red tape. We should strive to provide care in a language the patient and their family understands, which has been shown to improve health outcomes.

Language politics simply don’t belong in hospitals, and there are no circumstances under which we can justify deliberately undermining access to health care in another language for those who need it. Frankly, anyone not actively working to help Quebecers receive better and quicker care should just get out of the way of those who are.  

Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada. She can be reached on X @toulastake 

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