If you haven’t already read it, read my colleague Katia Gagnon’s report on the “resource” Chez Lise, published in The Press Sunday1. This is a complex of rooming houses that accommodates 130 multipoqués, on the South Shore.
They have consumption and behavior problems. Demons in their head, often. For $1,000 a month, they are fed, housed and taken care of from A to Z, from washing to medication.
And it works. It’s not easy, but it works.
I was therefore moved and fascinated by the story of Chez Lise, which exists and acts on the margins of the “network” and which prevents humans from sinking permanently.
At Lise, it was first the idea of a Lise, precisely, Lise Bissonnette, who held the place for years, at arm’s length. The complex was recently bought by two other ladies of heart, Sophie Noreau and Marie-Claude Lapointe.
The most vulnerable are also the most difficult for the system to manage, in the traditional “resources”. The Chez Lise team manages them with firmness and flexibility. The place is a fine example of the balance between the freedom that all humans want and the supervision that the residents of Chez Lise need.
I was saying: Chez Lise acts and exists on the margins of the system. Chez Lise helps, with artisanal means, more than 100 people to live a better life.
And not to end up on the street.
It is therefore a model that works, Chez Lise. A small agile structure that takes care of basic needs, which repairs bits of the holed social net that produces homeless people. This is a model that the system cannot ignore, I emphasize: the system itself sends difficult cases to Chez Lise.
Reading Katia, I said to myself: this model is a model that works, with what is needed for freedom for poqués and supervision by dedicated people, on the floor. I said to myself: why doesn’t the system imitate the model of Chez Lise, why doesn’t the State, with all its means, manage to multiply the model of Chez Lise…
I was dreaming standing up, of course. And my awakening was brutal while listening to Paul Arcand, Monday morning, who told a story which seems to have no connection with Chez Lise… But which illuminates it, by the tape2.
Paul gave the microphone to a mother. Her 12-year-old son has the nasty Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. A disease that requires acute medical care to avoid sharp pains that keep you doubled over.
In the case of this boy, the system ended up working well when the formidable Sainte-Justine team took charge of him, arrived at a diagnosis and a care protocol adapted to his needs.
Why did the lady hunker down on the radio?
Because the more Soviet side of the government bureaucracy stepped in to make life difficult for this child and his family.
The child developed pain, the medical specialist told him: we take care of it, we just have to give us stool samples in sterile containers, for laboratory analysis.
Where are these sterile containers located?
In CLSCs.
So the lady calls the CLSC in her neighborhood and asks if she can pick up these sterile containers there…
Response from the CLSC: tut-tut-tut, it’s not that simple, you can’t just show up at the CLSC like that to pick up sterile containers that are in stock, Madam! You have to go through Clic Santé!
Next available appointment slot?
In three weeks !
Three weeks of waiting to pick up containers, by appointment. You read correctly.
And when the child’s mother protested, when she pointed out the absurdity of the situation – monopolizing a range of CLSC appointments to simply pick up sterile containers – she was told: it’s the procedure, madam.
I would also point out that the mother was told that the collection of sterilized containers is only done on Mondays and Tuesdays, between 9 am and 10 am. So, if we take possession of the containers on a Wednesday, there is no question of bringing the samples back to the CLSC the next day!
I remind you that the child is in pain, that he is suffering. But pain doesn’t fit into a small box. Why make it simple when you can make it complicated ?
Anyway, I come back to Chez Lise: the system invented by the ladies of hearts of this resource is too simple for our Soviet bureaucracy which manages the archipelago of the health and social services gulag in Quebec. At Lise, it’s the opposite of the bureaucratic gulag that bends humans to fit them into its own little bureaucratic boxes: we bend to the needs of the humans we house.
If Chez Lise was run by the government, we’d get bogged down in guest-to-responder ratios, guests would have to be home by 10 p.m. and not make too much noise, they wouldn’t be allowed to smoke in their rooms, we’d probably end up with 66 duly unionized employees with all the administrative heaviness that entails, and the housekeeper who always takes the time to talk to customers who need an ear, well, we would impose the Totoya-Machin method of cleaning a room on her in less than seven minutes and forty-five seconds…
And multipoques would not be better supported than they are now.
It would probably be worse.
Am I exaggerating? Maybe. But not that much.
The Government of Quebec is right – like the other provinces – to ask Ottawa for billions in health care and social services, because the federal government has shied away from its responsibilities since the 1990s.
But the ankylosed and stupid bureaucracy of the Quebec government, a system that produces so many absurdities that all the annual content of this newspaper would not be enough to cover them completely, that is not the fault of the federal government…
It is that of the Government of Quebec.