Meilleur points to French culture
PCS tried to shut Monfort, Grit recalls
A Progressive Conservative government would threaten vital French-speaking institutions in Eastern Ontario, a Liberal candidate warned on Thursday morning outside the Montfort Hospital.
Last time the Tories were in power, they tried to close the Montfort after promising not to close hospitals, said Ottawa-Vanier Liberal incumbent Madeleine Meilleur, who was a nurse at the hospital for 14 years. It took a court fight to keep the only francophone teaching hospital in Ontario open.
With Liberals believed to be facing tough challenges in heavily French-speaking Ottawa- Orléans and Glengarry-Prescott-Russell (two ridings Conservatives hold federally), Meilleur and her fellow candidates brought out stalwarts of that fight in the late 1990s: former federal cabinet minister and hospital board chairman Jean-Jacques Blais, former Vanier mayor and MPP Bernard Grandmaître, and crusading lawyer Ron Caza.
Meilleur appealed to worries that francophone culture could be threatened.
“I worked here in the delivery room. I saw many babies born here,” she said, switching between English and French. “For me, I have a lot of emotions being here today.”
The fight for the Montfort was symbolic, Meilleur said, and the fact it’s still there, its capacity doubled under Liberals, “is a testimony to that fight.”
Ottawa- Orléans candidate Marie-France Lalonde, a rookie running to succeed retiring MPP Phil McNeely, recalled being a social worker during the Mike Harris years and having to send clients as far away as Plantagenet to get services in French. Glengarry-Prescott-Russell incumbent Grant Crack boasted of the money the Liberals in government have sunk into the Montfort and the Hawkesbury hospital in his riding.
Tory leader Tim Hudak has promised not to cut front-line health services amid broad cuts he plans to make to Ontario’s public service. But he was parliamentary assistant to the minister of health in the late 1990s and was promoted to cabinet in 1999, while the court battle over the Montfort continued till 2001.