French-language inspectors are cracking down on Montreal hospitals

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Language inspectors from the Office québécois de la langue française are expanding the range of their inspections beyond businesses and are now targeting hospitals in the Montreal area, even going so far as to verify whether French is being spoken in operating rooms, The Gazette has learned.

In fact, an inspection is planned for Wednesday at Santa Cabrini Hospital, an institution built in 1960 to better serve Montreal’s Italian community. In preparation for Wednesday’s visit, Santa Cabrini managers issued a memo reminding staff to speak to all patients in French first.

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The visits are raising the ire of some hospital staff, who are upset that they are being taken away from their pressing medical duties to be grilled by language inspectors.

“The medical staff are annoyed,” a Santa Cabrini source told The Gazette. “It’s probably some (employees from nearby Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital who) complained, since we have a lot of McGillers using English.”

The source questioned the government’s priorities in devoting considerable financial resources to checking the language spoken in Montreal hospitals when the health system is in such a deplorable state.

The source, who speaks French fluently and agreed to be interviewed on condition that their name not be published because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said they fully support the promotion of French in Quebec. But they criticized what they described as “coercive” measures following the Coalition Avenir Québec government’s overhaul of the Charter of the French Language with the adoption of Bill 96 in 2022.

An internal memo by Santa Cabrini, obtained by The Gazette, spells out for staff how to comply with Bill 96 in the health sector.

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“The operating rooms and minor surgery (although closed on this day) will be visited by the OQLF on Wednesday,” the memo states.

“Here are a few reminders about the application of Bill 96 (‘An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Quebec’). All signage must be in French (Italian is accepted at Santa Cabrini, but the notice must also have a French version).

“The working language must be French at all times,” the memo adds. “All documents, notes and records must be in French at all times.

“Users must be addressed in French. If users do not speak French, they may ask to be addressed in another language. Apart from compliance with these sections of the law, no special measures are required for (Wednesday’s inspection).”

A year ago, OQLF inspectors visited the Jewish General Hospital in Côte-des-Neiges, another source told The Gazette. “They saw some old plaques in English and Yiddish listing the names of donors and they suggested that we put up another plaque in French.”

The second source, who also agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity, bristled at the notion of language inspectors touring busy hospitals to ensure that French is spoken.

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OQLF spokesperson Chantal Bouchard explained the larger context of the hospital inspections.

“As of June 1, 2022, the Charter of the French Language requires organizations in the health and social services network to comply with the charter,” Bouchard said in an email.

“As part of this process, they must submit an analysis of their linguistic situation to the Office, leading to the issuance of an attestation of compliance. The Office issues an attestation of conformity when their use of French complies with the provisions of the charter and they meet their other obligations under the charter.

“It is within the framework of this approach that visits to different spaces can take place in (a health) establishment,” Bouchard added. “It is up to the establishment to determine the schedule and the sites to be visited, in conjunction with a representative of the establishment. If a facility offers to include an operating theatre in the tour, the visit always takes place in an unoccupied OR, in compliance with the facility’s safety guidelines.”

The OQLF’s expansion into the health sector comes after a study it made public in April showed that the use of French in public spaces remained “stable” from 2007 to 2022, belying assertions by the CAQ government and other observers that French has been in decline. In fact, the study found that the use of English in the health sector for all of Quebec declined from 9.2 per cent in 2016 to 8.2 per cent in 2022.

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On the island of Montreal, the use of French in the health sector jumped from 2016 to 2022. “The proportion of people using French to communicate with health services increased by 2.8 percentage points (from 68.6 per cent to 71.4 per cent), while that of people using English decreased by 3.7 percentage points (from 23.3 per cent to 19.6 per cent),” the study observed.

Bill 96 requires that all government workers — including those in hospitals and nursing homes — use French exclusively in written and oral communications with their clients, with certain exceptions, like emergencies. Yet even before Bill 96’s adoption, the tenuous bilingual status of hospitals in the province had become a grave point of concern for Quebec’s anglophone community.

A growing body of research has shown that language barriers can result in poorer medical outcomes, with a 2015 U.S. study warning that “miscommunication in the health-care sector can be life-threatening.”

What’s more, a 2019 study by Quebec’s public health institute found that a significant number of English-speaking Quebecers “face language barriers in their daily lives” when it comes to accessing health care. However, earlier that year Premier François Legault said he would not reverse a decision to remove English from long-standing signs at a hospital in Lachute despite concerns raised by nine mayors in the lower Laurentians.

The CAQ government’s stand on the bilingual status of hospitals is in sharp contrast with the declaration by former Parti Québécois premier Lucien Bouchard in 1996 that “when you go to the hospital and you’re in pain, you may need a blood test, but you certainly don’t need a language test.”

The OQLF lists on its website a dozen long-standing health and social services institutions that fall under Section 29.1 of the language charter granting them bilingual status, including the Shriners Hospital for Children and the McGill University Health Centre. Santa Cabrini is not on that list.

And following the adoption of Bill 15 — the massive reform of the health system — the newly created Santé Québec agency now has the power to revoke the bilingual status of hospitals.

aderfel@postmedia.com

twitter.com/Aaron_Derfel

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