Steve Anthony: True Canadian Pharmacy

p The committee taking the government to court is alleging that amalgamation has taken away the only health authority that was working legally in French. The group taking the New Brunswick government to court over last year’s health reforms is getting support from the Montfort Hospital, an Ontario institution that faced a similar fight a decade ago. Gérald Savoie, the hospital’s executive director and an Acadian from Campbellton, will retire in !–more– October but he said he wants to help the Committee for Equality of Health in French win its legal battle against provincial government reforms. We’re talking about people who govern a health-care institution, that their first and upper-most [concern is] to make sure that the French language is preserved, he said. The Montfort battle has been an inspiration for us from the beginning. The Montfort experience is being used as an example for the legal battle that’s being fought in New Brunswick against the Liberal government’s decision to reduce the number of regional health authorities to two from eight. We’re talking about governance. Dr. The commission later proposed to merge it with another hospital and make it bilingual. Hubert Dupuis, the committee’s president, said he appreciates the support from the Ottawa francophone hospital. It’s the very, very similar battle. I think the Franco-Ontarians have shown us the way, Dupuis said. The organization has recruited Michel Bastarache, a retired Supreme Court of Canada judge and expert in linguistic cases, to assist in the case along with Michel Doucet, a law professor at the Université de Moncton. Savoie was executive director of Montfort Hospital in 1997 when a commission set up by former Ontario premier Mike Harris government first proposed to close it down. The Montfort hospital is a French institution in Ottawa that went to court 10 years ago to fight for its survival.

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