BY MICHEL DUGRÉ
MONTREAL - Protests involving thousands of working people
are being organized almost every day since the Quebec
government announced plans May 11 to close nine hospitals in
the Montreal area. Close to 1,600 beds are slated to be lost
in the coming year. More than 9,500 workers will be effected
by these cuts, with several thousands losing their jobs
altogether. The Parti Quebecois (PQ) government has no plan
to transfer services to other hospitals.
"We might lose our jobs," said Sharon Blackman, a nurse at the Lachine General Hospital, "but what's at stake here is the public's life."
Coalitions of trade unions, community organizations, and hospital workers are springing up to organize against these drastic cuts. A number of streets in Montreal are draped with banners declaring "My hospital, I keep it."
While these actions were being organized in Montreal, more than 5,000 people demonstrated in Quebec City in front of the Christ-Roi hospital. This facility has not yet even been slated for cuts.
Prime minister greeted by protests
When Quebec's premier Jacques Parizeau spoke at a Montreal
hotel May 29 some 500 trade union members picketed. Earlier
in the day a similar number demonstrated in front of the
Santa Cabrini hospital against service cuts announced by the
local administration.
More than 800 hospital workers dressed in black, went to the Montreal Expos baseball game May 31 to publicize their fight to keep the hospitals open. The next day, some 400 people participated in a vigil against the closing down of the Queen Elizabeth hospital.
Hundreds of health-care workers also participated in the Women's March against Poverty in Quebec City June 4.
The decision to close hospitals comes despite the PQ government's earlier promise that it would freeze its social service budget, rather than impose major cutbacks. Parizeau is blaming cuts in transfer payments from the federal government to the provinces for the hospital closings.
Of the 7 million people living in Quebec, 80 percent make up an oppressed French-speaking nationality. With the crisis of the capitalist economy, the oppression of Quebecois is deepening.
In February 1995, a record 808,000 people depended on social welfare benefits in Quebec, more than 11 percent of the population. In addition, 381,000 people received unemployment compensation during the same period. Thus, about one in four people in Quebec depend on either welfare or unemployment benefits, two years into an upturn in the economy.
Government attacks on social services are especially explosive in Quebec where the fight against the national oppression of Quebecois has often taken the form of struggles to improve health and education services. Quebec's hospitals and schools are divided into separate English-and French-language systems. Schools are also divided into Protestant and Catholic. The English-language schools and hospitals are markedly superior to those serving francophones.
Quebecois earn on the average 16 percent less than those who speak English in Quebec. Their chances of getting a university diploma are just half of those who speak English. The rate of functional illiteracy among francophones in Canada is almost double the rate among anglophones.
Unionists debate government actions
Delegates to the May 19 meeting of the federal council of
the Federation of Social Affairs (FAS) of the Confederation
of National Trade Unions (CSN) overwhelmingly adopted a
motion that "the FAS take publicly a position against the
sovereigntist project of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) as long as
its current social policies and its approach on the question
of social services are not changed." One delegate explained
that "We are not against sovereignty as such, but against a
sovereignty that means that hospitals are closed and social
services cut." The FAS organizes close to 100,000 health-
care workers in Quebec and represents 40 percent of the CSN
membership.
CSN president Gérald Larose, who attended the meeting, opposed the decision arguing that Quebec sovereignty and social services are two completely different things. This was also the reaction of Parizeau who said, "It doesn't make sense to negotiate the future of a country for a question of wages."
This debate broke out during 435 public hearings involving 55,000 participants organized by Quebec's Commission on the Future of Quebec during February and March. The PQ government had hoped to use the hearings to broaden public support for its referendum to establish a "sovereign" Quebec, in which the provincial government would have substantially greater powers than it now has. Instead, many working people and other participants kept raising questions about how to solve unemployment and reduce poverty.
The majority of participants supported one form or another of greater autonomy for Quebec, though not necessarily the PQ's proposal. "It is high time that we draw a line on the Canadian experience and that we pledge ourselves to move toward greater control of our future through building our own country: Quebec," said Janvier Cliche, president of the CSN central council for the region of Estrie, at one of the meetings.
Preoccupied with maintaining gains
But many asked how the PQ's sovereignty proposal would
affect the conditions of poor women, of farmers, handicapped
people, and others. They were preoccupied in particular with
maintaining social services and programs.
"Quebec sovereignty without a real collective perspective of social solidarity would be an empty shell," said one participant at a meeting in Montreal. "Why build a new country if it is only a pale copy of what it was," asked Robert Tremblay, from the Anti-poverty Organization.
This debate illustrates divergent class interests coming more and more to the surface on the question of Quebec sover eignty. The PQ government represents the interests of a small layer of capitalists in Quebec aspiring to use their greater control over the government as a weapon in their fight against their capitalist rivals in Canada and internationally.
In contrast, health-care workers have been at the center of some of the most important battles against national oppression, especially through their fights for improving living and working conditions, overcoming social inequalities between men and women, and eliminating regional disparities in the quality of social services.
While the capitalist media focuses on the debate between Quebec and Ottawa leading up to the sovereignty referendum, that is not the center of the ongoing fight of Quebecois against their oppression. Public opinion polls show close to half of all voters support the PQ's sovereignty proposal, however, it has generated little enthusiasm among working people, even those who plan to vote for it.
The real fight against national oppression is today centered on the defense of working people's social gains won through decades of struggle. And that fight is bringing thousands of working people into the streets.