Pubdate: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU) Copyright: 2016 Postmedia Network Inc. Contact: http://www.montrealgazette.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274 Author: Basem Boshra Page: A2 DETOX CENTRES ARE TANGIBLE VICTIMS OF AUSTERITY Since being voted into power in the spring of 2014, the Quebec Liberal government has been zealously deploying polarizing "austerity" measures, chopping services to the public in a tunnel-visioned pursuit of its political Holy Grail: a balanced budget. Significant cutbacks to health and education in particular, and the detrimental impact they have had on both the Quebecers who use these services and those who deliver them, have quickly become a consequential part of the public discourse in the province, with few of us remaining unaffected, directly or indirectly, by this new regime. The latest group to find itself in the "austerity" crosshairs is welfare recipients, specifically those who are trying to free themselves from addictions to drugs or alcohol, and the beleaguered detox centres that treat them. Beginning in May 2015, Quebecers on welfare who are in-patients at detox centres saw their monthly benefits slashed from $747 to $200. Since those detox centres rely on their users to defray some of the cost of their treatment - the portion users are expected to cover varies by centre, but it's roughly $300 a month - many patients have been forced to abandon getting help for their addictions at the centres, which have seen their number of patients plummet in the months since the cuts were implemented. It didn't take long for those cutbacks to do tangible damage to the detox system. (There are 92 detox centres in the province, treating some 13,000 patients, roughly 80 per cent of whom are on welfare.) In September, the Maison ReNasci detox centre in East Angus, in the Eastern Townships, shut down after six years in operation, leaving 32 of its patients to find alternate treatment centres. Last week, the Centre Melaric in the Laurentians town of Saint-Andre-d'Argenteuil, one of the largest detox centres in the province, which had been treating addicts for almost 33 years, closed its doors. Some 75 people receiving treatment there were cut loose, and 16 employees were laid off. Another detox centre in the region, Centre Nouvelle-Vie in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, says it too might have to close soon. In each of these cases, the centre's operators made it clear their troubles were directly related to the recent welfare cuts. Yet the Liberal government, via minister Lucie Charlebois, who is responsible for this particular file, has deflected any blame back on the centres, suggesting their struggles are due not to welfare cuts, but to fiscal mismanagement on the part of the centres. The opposition Parti Quebecois, as it tends to be, has been scathing in its criticism of these latest cuts. PQ leader Pierre Karl Peladeau has called them "odious." On Friday, the party's social affairs critic, Jean-Francois Lisee, pinned the blame for the burgeoning detox centre crisis squarely on the Liberals, making public three reports from independent consultants that warned the government its cuts to welfare recipients in rehab would irrevocably destabilize the province's detox centres and ultimately lead many of them to shut down. Despite the protestations from the PQ, and from those in the detox milieu, there is undeniably a political savvy to these specific cuts, especially among the substantial swath of the taxpaying populace that elects (and re-elects) governments. Welfare recipients are easy scapegoats at the best times. Welfare recipients who are hooked on alcohol and drugs? In "austere" times, no less? Talk about your low-hanging fruit. (All of which is to say I have been doing this long enough to know a significant proportion of the reaction to this column will be variations on "Throw these bums out on to the streets and make them find real jobs like the rest of us.") But while they may score the Liberals some easy political points, the callousness of these particular cuts, directed as they are at such a vulnerable group of people, is sadly emblematic of this government's propensity to place the fiscal bottom line above the quality of lives of its citizens. The kicker: the government estimates its welfare reforms will save all of $6 million a year, scarcely a drop in the budgetary bucket when you consider that it plans to spend some $100 billion during the current fiscal year. Saving such a meagre amount of taxpayer money in exchange for causing so much grief for these poor souls who, as we so often exhort them to, are simply trying to turn their lives around, is not an example of fiscal rectitude to be applauded, but of a lack of human decency that should be denounced. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom