Signing bonuses are the latest tool Quebec is using to try to entice health care workers to the Pontiac. In the final weeks of 2025, the Pontiac Journal ran several pieces examining the increasingly troubled state of the health care system.
A veteran Pontiac physician, Dr. Thomas O’Neill, pointed out that working conditions are among the most important reasons professionals remain in – or leave – their positions over time. A signing bonus, such as those recently announced for some nurses and specialists, disappears within months, only to be countered by a similar offer from another region.
The 2025 showdown between family doctors and the province over increased workloads appears to be yet another example of misdirected efforts, as explained by Dr. O’Neill. What else could Quebec try as a meaningful improvement to a system that so clearly isn’t working?
Over the decades, the Pontiac has endured wave after wave of reform: decentralized health care management, the concentration of points of service, rotating specialists, and even a push toward expanded home care. Yet the system remains strained.
The real head-scratcher is why all this trial and error continues. Caring for the unwell is as old as humanity itself — is this truly still such a mystery for modern policymakers? Dr. O’Neill suggests that more doctors are at the heart of the solution. More physicians, along with more health-care providers across the board, seems a credible and refreshingly straightforward answer. The KISS principle applies here — keep it simple.
Enough money has been spent on middle management and consulting firms tasked with reinventing a system that is, at its core, not that complicated. No one in the Pontiac is asking for a luxury health-care system dependent on dense urban populations to sustain it. Nor is anyone seriously suggesting that the next Quebec government should overhaul the education system to graduate more of the professionals we need — and then simply hire them.
What people want is far more basic: a system that doesn’t see hospitals operating at more than 200% capacity, as was the case in the Outaouais in early January 2026.
Quebec’s provincial candidates with an interest in health care will undoubtedly have many ideas to offer as the province considers its next steps in delivering this essential service. Our current MNA, André Fortin, has, in his role as health critic, been at the forefront of thinking about how to build a viable system of care for the Pontiac.
Surely, together, a rethink is possible — one that avoids the messy, reactive proposals that feel less like solutions and more like trying every new idea that comes along.
