An Important Meeting

Mrs. Blais has always been very involved with people who are deaf or hearing impaired, and I have been able to meet with her on various occasions. She even knew my father, who was a television producer. At the time, Mrs. Blais was tap dancing to shows my father made. She also tap-danced on the RSVP show with René. In short, my friendship with Marguerite Blais is not new, and it was a pleasure to see her again to talk about hearing health and the condition of seniors.

After her post-doctoral studies in communications, Marguerite Blais became a television and radio host before launching a political career in 2007. She then took a political break to care for her husband. As she talked about the realities of informal caregivers, she realized how desperate their needs are. When she returned to politics in 2018, she naturally turned to advocacy for seniors and caregivers. “If we want to make progress, we need to involve politics. That’s why I came back. I visit a lot of long-term care centres and I always get emotional when I leave them. We haven’t been taking care of our seniors for a long time now. I don’t blame anyone, but our society doesn’t want to deal with aging. It makes us confront the end of our lives and our parents’ lives.”

Mrs. Blais’ department is working to set up seniors’ homes where everything hospital-related is camouflaged. They’re not end-of-life environments, but living environments. Small apartments will be set up for caregivers, who can book them for a few days to visit their loved ones. “We need to renovate our long-term care centres so much, the same way we need to renovate our schools and our roads. And it’s not just good for seniors—it’s good for employees, too. If you provide a pleasant work environment, maybe you’ll have more staff.” And we will need more staff, because we’re one of the oldest societies.

When I asked her what she wants for Quebec’s seniors, she answered, with all the passion and empathy she’s known for, that she wants us to respect them more, visit them more often and fight ageism together. She also wants to break social isolation. “Quebec has the highest rate of loneliness in Canada. Humans aren’t meant to live alone.” She says this reminds her of her father, who had a housekeeper come by regularly. “Every time I went to his house, I would see cobwebs. I told him to complain, that his cleaning lady wasn’t very good. He replied: ‘Marguerite, I don’t want her here to clean. I want her to have coffee and talk to me.’ And it’s not just my father who’s like that, it’s all kinds of other seniors.” She also tells me that her father preferred to go to the cash register to withdraw money, even if it cost him more, so that he could interact with a person rather than a machine. Social isolation in seniors is a real issue, and it needs to be addressed. We can start making a difference now by visiting them, listening to them and including them in our lives.

Another way to break seniors’ isolation is to help them take care of their hearing health. Undiagnosed or untreated hearing loss can lead to isolation because it makes it difficult for people to participate in conversations. Mrs. Blais is well aware of this issue. “We don’t take care of our seniors’ hearing loss, and that causes a lot of loneliness. We need to understand that

hearing-impaired people live in residences and long-term care homes. We need lights and technologies that let everyone understand each other. If we start teaching staff about hearing loss, we can give our seniors a better quality of life.” Some places already do this. For example, I recently visited a residence that offered sign language classes to its residents so that they could communicate better with other residents who were deaf or hearing impaired, with severe to profound hearing loss. But there’s still a lot of work to be done to adapt care homes and long-term care centres to the needs of the hearing impaired.

Marguerite Blais is very aware of the needs of people who have been deaf or hearing impaired for a long time. In 1994, the Raymond-Dewar Institute asked her to become its spokesperson, after seeing her working with an interpreter on TV. At first, she refused, because she didn’t know anyone who was deaf. The Institute insisted anyway. This led her to take sign language courses, which made her aware of the fact that she had ignored this reality despite having worked in a closely related field—communications—for many years. She then went to the documentation centre to borrow two books on deafness that changed her life: Harlan Lane’s The Mask of Benevolence and Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices. Shortly thereafter, she decided to return to university to study Deaf culture. “It was a subject that interested and fascinated me. I did a master’s degree in Deaf history and culture, and a doctorate in highly educated Deaf youth. It was a fascinating world to discover.”

During my meeting with Mrs. Blais, I realized that even though she has not been exposed to deafness on a daily basis, she is very knowledgeable about the subject and is well aware of the issues involved. She is concerned about young adults who are developing hearing loss earlier and earlier because of their exposure to loud sounds, and seniors who refuse to wear hearing aids. “They don’t mind wearing glasses, but hearing aids are something else.” Marguerite Blais knows that there is still a lot of awareness work to be done on this front, and she plans to focus more and more on seniors’ hearing health in the coming months.

In closing, I would like to personally thank Mrs. Blais for her involvement with the Deaf community. For the past eleven years, she has granted a $1,000 scholarship to a deaf or hearing-impaired child to help them with their university studies. A few years ago, my daughter Rosalie was able to benefit from this scholarship, which allowed her to buy a computer that was adapted to her needs.

Thank you for this wonderful meeting and for your sensitivity, Mrs. Blais. As always, it was a pleasure to talk to you!