“What they’re doing is pestering the staff to see if they’re working in French,” says organizer Mario Napolitano. “Focus on health care, on hiring nurses, not on hiring language inspectors.”
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A group of protesters made up largely of Italian senior citizens gathered in front of the Santa Cabrini Hospital on Saturday to express fears they won’t be served in the language they best understand because of strengthened French-language laws.
The participants were spurred by a visit to the hospital by the province’s French-language watchdog, the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), earlier this week.
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“It’s us who helped build this hospital. So why tell us we can’t be served in a language that we understand?” said Maria D’Alesio, the president of a St-Leonard golden-agers club, accompanied by several of her members. She displayed an article from a local Italian-language newspaper reporting about $4 million raised by the Italian community and donated last month.
“We give these donations every year. And now they want to make us believe that the immigrants here, those who helped to construct this country, at the end of their days, they won’t be spoken to in the language that they understand? It’s terrible. Terrible.”
About 40 people turned out to demonstrate at the front entrance to the hospital and carried placards with an image of “Bill 96” crossed out in red. Motorists driving by honked their horns in support.
The demonstrators were reacting to a report in The Gazette a “francization adviser” visited the hospital — founded in 1960 to serve Montreal’s Italian community — to check whether it was conforming to the Charter of the French Language. An internal memo by Santa Cabrini advised staff an OQLF representative would be touring the operating rooms, which would be unoccupied.
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On Friday, OQLF spokesperson Chantal Bouchard told 98.5 FM “there were several department chiefs who were identified during the visit to verify the service in question. It was not intrusive. The francization adviser did not (interfere) in the care” of patients.
Bouchard added the visit was also intended to verify whether staff were “able to operate the biomedical equipment in French” and whether the instruction manuals were in French.
Protest organizer Mario Napolitano, who leads the group Bridging Ethnic Communities, said the government should leave language politics outside of hospitals and focus on the province’s health-care needs instead.
“The last thing we want is that we have our grandmother in the hospital and we have to put up with this. It’s unacceptable,” he said. “What they’re doing is pestering the staff to see if they’re working in French. This is an Italian hospital where a lot of the doctors work in English. They have to stop with this because we’re losing our humanity as a society.”
“Focus on health care, on hiring nurses, not on hiring language inspectors. This is ridiculous. That’s the message that we want to get out.”
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The visit to Santa Cabrini and to the Jewish General Hospital last year (where a language inspector requested donor plaques in English and Yiddish also be added in French) is part of an effort by the OQLF to expand its inspections beyond businesses. The OQLF aims to ensure Bill 96, the Coalition Avenir Québec’s overhaul of the Charter of the French Language adopted in 2022, is enforced.
Bill 96 requires all government workers, including those in hospitals and nursing homes, use French “systematically” in written and oral communications with their clients, with certain exceptions, like emergencies. On Friday, two local Liberal Members of Parliament denounced a July 18 directive by Quebec’s Health Ministry that stipulates the exceptional circumstances under which English can be spoken in hospitals and other medical facilities.
Sharon Freedman, one of the organizers of the protest who worked as a social worker at the Jewish General for 40 years, said many fear concerns over language will undermine proper medical care.
“Now, there’s all kinds of dos and don’ts to speak to someone in an operating room,” she said. “By the time they get through the rules, the patient will be dead. This is all craziness.”
Freedman came out Saturday to send a message, she said, and to spur others in anglophone or other linguistic communities to stand up.
“I just said, this is all so ridiculous. This apathy has to stop. … My family has been here for 125 years and I’m tired of being called an immigrant because I’m an anglophone.”
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