Upon his arrival in Quebec on April 20, Daniel Desharnais [NDLR: qui venait d’être nommé sous-ministre adjoint aux projets spéciaux du ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux trois jours plus tôt, le 17 avril 2020] finds himself alone in an office. He has no employees, not even a secretary. Only a desk, a computer… and a mandate: to try to predict where the next fire will break out. He tries to obtain data from the CHSLD network. For example, what are the places that are understaffed and therefore likely to be disorganized and let the virus in? “I quickly gave up. Our management systems do not allow this. In fact, I realized that everywhere, we were at risk. »
And meanwhile, François Legault, who is an accountant, so a man of numbers, gets impatient every morning in the crisis unit. He wants data. How much ? Where ? What is the extent of the staff shortage?
“In the mornings, at the crisis unit, we no longer talked about hospitals, we talked about CHSLDs. It becomes a big torture session. Are you able to see a few cases in a CHSLD without the whole building being contaminated? It’s been two weeks since we saw a CHSLD arrive in the yellow; we knew that, two days later, it was going to be in the orange and in the red. It was rising slowly, it was settling in front of us: no matter how hard we tried to do everything, it ended like this. We were totally helpless, ”says Jonathan Valois.
At the start of the crisis, the Prime Minister was mainly concerned with protective equipment. Every day, he asked for the state of stocks and the delivery schedule. “And then he went from an “obsession with personal protective equipment” mode to an “obsession with CHSLDs” mode. And when he has an obsession, he takes numbers and tables, ”recalls an adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office, who asked not to be named.
The Prime Minister’s questions are very often addressed to Deputy Minister Yvan Gendron. This man has worked for nearly twenty years in the health network and in the senior public service. He is calm, almost placid. Affable smile, white hair. For him, the crisis is not just theoretical: his mother is housed in a CHSLD and was the first in her establishment to contract COVID. At ninety-six, she finally survived the coronavirus.
Within the crisis unit, Yvan Gendron takes up a lot, a lot of space. At the large meeting table, from the first day, he sits right in front of François Legault, where the Minister of Health should have been. And, like in a high school class, everyone went back to “their place” every day during the long months that followed.
Danielle McCann finds herself very far from the heart of the action. When questions are addressed to him, Yvan Gendron often answers for him. In short, Yvan Gendron takes up a lot more space than a deputy minister normally takes up.
It is he whom François Legault bombards with questions, as well as the assistant deputy minister Natalie Rosebush, who was invited to join the meetings after the Herron crisis. She arrives every day armed with a huge briefcase in order to draw from it the tables and the data that François Legault demands, moreover almost always dissatisfied with the answers he is given.
With each question that François Legault launches, Yvan Gendron tries to be reassuring. It is his posture-reflex, the one he invariably adopts with his political bosses and which is an integral part of his personality. A mistake, Minister Danielle McCann will judge a posteriori during an interview for this book.
“It was annoying. Mr. Gendron is very competent. He gave everything he could give. He did everything he could do. But actually, he has this trait, [celui] to want to be reassuring. And in a crisis situation, this is the posture he has taken. And maybe that didn’t serve him well. In a crisis situation, when something almost catastrophic happens, you have to say it,” says McCann today.
“There are just two people who come from the network [de la santé] in this cell: me and Horacio [Arruda, directeur national de la santé publique], retorts Yvan Gendron. We were the ones answering the questions. When Mr. Legault said “How do death certificates work?” and I said to him “It comes by fax”, he said to me: “Does it still exist, faxes?” Yes. That’s how it’s designed, again. We give as much data as we can! There was an urgent need to have the most accurate data possible, with a system that is not designed for that, and in a system where thousands of workers were missing! »
The impatience of François Legault grows every day in front of the evasive answers of the deputy minister. A deep crisis of confidence in Yvan Gendron then set in. Does the information it gives really reflect the reality of the state of the network?
This is therefore the reason why, ten days after Herron, there are now spies on the line during a meeting of the crisis cell. And their judgment is final: in several respects, the situation on the ground is much more catastrophic than what the deputy minister says, particularly on a central issue, that of manpower.
Months later, during an interview for this book, Yvan Gendron will defend himself: « I was able to say how much there was a lack of workers in the network, whether due to COVID, whether immunosuppressed or because that they are pregnant, that they have illnesses. That, I can say. From there to say how much it would take me, is it 10,000, 12,000, that was difficult. »
On April 15, the Ministry of Health finally communicated a first count as to the number of employees who were missing in the network: there were 6,373 absent employees, including 1,382 in CHSLDs. Normally, there are 3,000 to 4,000 absences, no more. The situation is therefore alarming. Ten days later, this number rose dramatically: 9,987 absent employees, including 2,936 in CHSLDs. On May 5, there were 11,187 missing employees, including 3,173 in CHSLDs.
It’s a real haemorrhage.
(5060: The carnage of COVID-19 in our CHSLDs, by Gabrielle Duchaine, Katia Gagnon and Ariane Lacoursière, published by Éditions du Boréal. In bookstores March 29, 2022. Excerpt published with the permission of the publisher.)
#exist #faxes
