by Nick Mayes

An ambitious fundraiser at Bourbon Street West is being planned for Patricia Jolicoeur and her family to try and offset some of the costs associated with her care at Pointe Claire's Le Vivalis private long-term health care facility.

The private services the centre provides affords the Jolicoeurs extra piece of mind that can't be found in the public healthcare system.

The SAAQ has already made it clear that as of January next year, the association will no longer foot the bill for Patricia's care at the facility which costs around $6000 a month. Frightened by the prospect of seeing their daughter consigned to a distant public long term care facility, the Jolicoeurs have vowed to do everything they can to keep Patricia where they feel she is receiving a superior quality of care as close as possible to her family and friends.



Sol Boxenbaum, host of CJAD's overnight show Last Call with Sol, is one of the event's organizers. He has interviewed Jolicoeur several times on his show and felt there was a need to do something about the family's situation. "We've spoken about his plight supporting his daughter with no help from the government," Boxenbaum told the Hudson/St. Lazare Gazette on Friday.

The original date for the benefit show has been changed but according to Boxenbaum, everything is going ahead according to plan. "It was supposed to take place on the 17th but we transferred it to the 24th and in doing so we may have lost a few acts but we've also gained a few," he explained. Either way, Boxenbaum asserts that the event will be a great evening of live music for an important cause. "It's going to be a great evening of local entertainment," he said. "The Ellingtons will be there, Alicia Ellington and her son and daughter April and Edward Ellington. They're quite famous, they're Duke Ellington's family."
Boxenbaum is so charged with enthusiasm for the show and hell-bent on helping out the Jolicoeurs that he's even envisioning future fundraisers. "I think we'll do this more than once. This show may be one of a series.

"We're not going to solve the problem but certainly what ever we can contribute I am sure they can use," he added.
The money generated by the fundraiser isn't the only initiative Boxenbaum has put together to help Patricia and her family. He's arranged for some very practical assistance that will make a real difference in the young woman's quality of life. "I made arrangements through the Generations Foundation which is run by Adrian Bercovici, for them to have a supply of diapers and towelettes. It helps because that stuff is expensive. Every time they need that they can just send the van to pick up more. It was really generous of them [Generations Foundation]," said Boxenbaum.

Despite the fact that the Jolicoeurs enjoy a middle-class lifestyle and receive SAAQ funding for their daughter Patricia's long-term care, the year since she was run down while walking the family dog near their Saddlebrook home has cost the family dearly. On Jan. 11, the Jolicoeurs were presented with a cheque for $4000 raised on their behalf by the St. Lazare Business Association.

Originally, it was hoped that enough money would be raised to create a foundation that would have used interest on the principal to cover the costs associated with Patricia's long-term care, but expenses are such that every bit of money raised covers immediate costs. In other words, constant fundraising has become the only way for the Jolicoeurs to defray part of the cost of Patricia's care at Le Vivalis.

"For us it makes a real difference," Jolicoeur admitted. "It's not only that, the things we are doing for Patricia presently are not covered by the SAAQ.

"The SAAQ has already told us that they won't foot the whole bill. They told us that coming Jan. 1 2009, they are only going to give us what they give to families that keep their loved ones at home, which I believe is $3,000," Claude Jolicoeur explained. "It's costing at least $6,000 for Patricia right now so if we want Patricia to stay there we're going to have to pay the other $3,000 personally."

The Jolicoeurs are running out of options and money and don't have a great deal of faith in the public system. "We know for a fact that we'd have to watch her like a hawk because we've been in the public system before, at the hospital," he explained.

Even with the superior quality of care Patricia is receiving at Le Vivalis, Jolicoeur admits that her family is still vigilant about monitoring her level of care and make a point of being vocal about any shortcoming they perceive. "We're doing it now at Le Vivalis and this is a private place that is supposed to have good care. They're pretty good but we still have to check.

"The other day my wife was at Le Vivalis and she started cleaning Patricia's ears and she found blood. Automatically we thought of the worst, a haemorrhage or an ear infection," he said. "The doctor came the next day and said that maybe they had cleaned her ears a little too far. So I'm telling you that we constantly have to check to see that she has been changed properly, that she goes into her wheelchair, that she's had her exercise," said Jolicoeur. "Imagine what it will be like for us when she's in the public sector, where there are even less people doing the work."

With regards to which facility Patricia will call home if she ends up being discharged from Le Vivalis for lack of SAAQ funding, her dad has no idea where she could be housed. "She could be sent a long way away. That's the thing," He's angry that his daughter, the victim of an accident, believed to have been caused by gross negligence will suffer from an even further diminished quality of life than the one she has at Le Vivalis. "That's the thing about the system we have. What it boils down to is that if you are a victim of a road accident, then you're really a victim of that accident," said Jolicoeur. "You're not going to get any coverage. Even if you show your good will and that you do everything."

To Jolicoeur, its as though the SAAQ considers Patricia's case no more than a cheque to process once a month. "My wife and I spend a tremendous amount of time caring for Patricia and being there and taking care of her but the SAAQ gives us no recognition of that," Jolicoeur argued.
While her long term stay at the Le Vivalis facility is the most costly factor associated with Patricia's care, it is just one of many. "Even physiotherapy, the SAAQ only covers $31 of the cost. Have you ever had a $31 physiotherapist? No way! It's more like $75 to $100 per hour," Jolicoeur explained. "There's physiotherapy, there's masso-therapy also and we're planning on restarting her hyperbaric treatments. For 40 treatments of one hour it's $5,000. And that's not even counting the transportation."

In a talk he gave to a church audience on Montreal's West Island two years ago, Sol Boxenbaum, a noted local gambling addiction expert, drew a comparison between the financial exploitation rich and powerful western nations have often been accused of imposing on Third World countries, and the social injustice the western nations are foisting on their own people through complicit actions which proliferate gambling here in its many forms.

"Is it any less true that we, who are by comparison the poor and vulnerable, are being exploited by the very people that we elected to protect and to represent us?" he asked. "Is it not a fact that gambling was considered illegal and immoral until governments realized how much money could be made by being the provider of the activity?" As Boxenbaum pointed out, not only have the gamblers become addicted, but the government itself is now also hooked on the revenues. And the problem with addictions, he added, is that they all come with consequences.
As many people by now are no doubt aware, you can't walk far anymore without seeing evidence of the importance gambling is now accorded in the mainstream. Test-your-luck claw machines, decked with flashing lights and filled with toys and gadgets for children, are a common sight in shopping malls. Among the most popular gifts from the major retail chains like Zeller's and Wal-Mart these last few Christmas seasons have been elaborate kits, complete with cards, chips and carrying case, for making blackjack and poker games mobile. In many of the same stores, special furniture just for gambling is easy to find.

Boxenbaum notes that governments haven't always sanctioned gambling, in whatever form it comes. Up to the 1960s, even lotteries and sweepstakes were still illegal in Canada, as were virtually most other forms of gambling. Before this period, it went on in so-called 'speakeasies,' where sharps and bookies often squireled away fortunes won at card tables, far from the scrutiny of the taxman. But then, as now, because the proceeds of gambling serve no useful purpose and contribute to deprivation, it is still money ill-gained.

Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau, in a bid to secure additional financing for the upcoming 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, broke the taboo when he suggested holding a special olympic lottery, whose proceeds, he argued, would be considered a "voluntary tax" paid freely by willing citizens. Those with long memories will recall how in those days the draws (which ended up being taken over by the federal and then provincial governments) were considered highly novel and took place during lavish, televised galas.

How far we've come since then. The proceeds from the olympic lottery barely made a dent in the massive cost overrun from the 1976 games, and today the government, in lieu of raising taxes, has become dependent on lotteries and many other forms of state-sanctioned gambling — including casinos — as an ongoing source of income to fund a range of public services. But how long can they continue heading down this path beset with a vicious dependency, before there is a consequence? According to Boxenbaum, the money that comes in as revenue to the government is actually depleting the economy, because no goods or services are being exchanged.

"They're taking money out that might have been spent at the clothing store or at the butcher shop or at the bakery or at the barber," he says. "The money can't be spent twice, so they're depleting the economy. They have people convinced that if not for gambling they would have had to increase taxes, and nobody wants to pay more taxes. I'm not an economist, but to my way of thinking if the loonie is out there circulating, every time it gets spent it creates taxes and it also does all the other things that come with the fact people are buying things. But when they grab that dollar in the casino or the slot machine, it's gone. It's killing the goose that lays the golden egg. That dollar is taken out of the economy. As a result of that, we suffer in more ways than just the moral aspect. It's the financial thing, too."

Photo: Martin C. Barry
‘What concerns us also is that video-lottery
terminals and horse racing are the two types
of games that are the most addictive say,’
Dr. Nicole Damestoy, left, director of public
health in Laval, and Dr. Blandine Piquet-Gauthier,
head of public health for the North Shore.

Laval and North Shore public health officials are sounding the alarm about how the planned relocation of the Hippodrome de Montréal to somewhere within their territory could end up negatively impacting problem gamblers, and what might also be expected following the opening this coming summer of a new casino just beyond their doorstep in the Laurentian community of Mont Tremblant.

Comprehensive facility
During a day-long conference last month on the psychological and social impacts of gambling co-sponsored by the two public health agencies, Dr. Nicole Damestoy, who heads the health service in Laval, and Dr. Blandine Piquet-Gauthier, who is responsible for the North Shore, told journalists that problem gambling in the region might not see improvement with the opening of new and comprehensive gaming facilities.
According to plans by Loto Quebec, which in addition to its lottery operations manages all forms of gaming across the province, a large number of the video-lottery terminals it operates are to be moved to centralized locations, such as the Hippodrome, which currently specializes in horse racing. Although the gaming agency has announced the Hippodrome's eventual relocation from its current site in west end Montreal, a fixed date hasn't been set.

Lottery terminals in neighbourhoods
Last year, the Laval public health authority released a study of the geographical location of video-lottery terminals across Laval and determined there was a concentration of them in the Chomedey, Pont Viau and Laval-des-Rapides districts. Coincidentally, they're also the city's most economically-deprived neighbourhoods. "The reason that we did this exercise is because the machines that are available in the bars and the restaurants are easily accessible, and we were also concerned that they were accessible in those neighbourhoods where the consequences of gaming are most important on the revenue of the families," Dr. Damestoy said in an interview with TLN.
While acknowledging that one of the arguments Loto Quebec has put forward to the government is that removing the terminals from residential neighbourhoods and concentrating them in a gaming complex "is a way of diminishing their accessibility and is a way of preventing pathological gambling," she added that wherever the new complex is situated, the population exposed to its consequences will inevitably be on the North Shore and in Laval. "It's an argument that's been developed by Loto Quebec saying if we remove the machines from the neighbourhoods we will diminish the accessibility.

Concentrating machines in one area
"With day-to-day accessibility it means it's easy to go into a bar. But going to a gaming complex requires travelling and effort to get there. But what concerns us also is that video-lottery terminals and horse racing are the two types of games that are the most addictive. So we have concern about concentrating such a large number of machines in one area. We know, for example, that 14 per cent of all people who play on video-lottery terminals get into trouble. It's a lot of people."
Another concern Drs. Damestoy and Piquet-Gauthier have is that when people get into trouble with pathological gambling, it has severe consequences not only on themselves, but on many others surrounding them. In addition, those who have problems with gambling often tend to seek help late in the process after they have suffered severe consequences. "We are trying to minimize the consequences of installing in the region a gaming complex," said Damestoy, adding that gaming has, nonetheless, become part of mainstream life and that most people who gamble don't develop serious problems.