Montreal -- Customer-service agents at the provincial health-insurance board, the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec, are now expected to do more than dispense information.
A new policy in effect at the agency requires employees who answer calls from the public to judge people’s language skills as well as answering questions they might have about matters relating to their health care.
Where before callers were given the option of service in English or French by way of a simple touch of the telephone keypad, it has now become more complicated. Now some people who would prefer to have the information given in English could be denied the service on the basis of a subjective judgment of their ability to speak French.
The way it works now is that calls to RAMQ are answered automatically in French, and callers are told that the agency first communicates with its clientele in French. Only after half a minute of silence is it mentioned that service in English is available by pressing 9. But wait: that doesn’t automatically get you service in English.
What it gets you is another recorded message, this time in English, informing you once more that the board prefers to deal with customers in French. The agents who subsequently come on the line do not speak English right away, even though the language of service chosen is English. No, the agents proceed in French, and are then required by the new policy to “use their judgment” to determine whether the caller speaks French well enough to be able to hold a conversation about health in French rather than English. Only if the caller fails that test will service in English be forthcoming.
The health-insurance board maintains that the policy is nothing more than an initiative to fully comply with the province’s French-first language policy. However, even under that policy it has long been acknowledged that anglophone Quebecers have a right to education and to health care in their own language, even though delivery of such service has been grudging and spotty in too many instances.
Officials at RAMQ seem to have forgotten former premier Lucien Bouchard’s words some years ago, when he said in a speech at an English community event: “When you go to the hospital and you’re in pain, you need a blood test, but you certainly don’t need a language test.” True, most callers to the health-insurance board are probably not in pain, but they are concerned with matters of health. And even if they are reasonably conversant in French, they may not be familiar with medical terminology. This would apply particularly to seniors, the age group in greatest need of health-care services.
In pain or not, one thing they certainly don’t need is to be subjected to a language test, least of all by someone not formally qualified to administer language testing, as RAMQ customer-service agents are unlikely to be.
It is hard to understand what benefit to the cause of French-language preservation this policy will bring to make it worth the complication it introduces to health-care delivery and the misunderstandings and patient suffering that could result. It might be noted that no such complication has been introduced by the provincial revenue service, which is happy to collect Quebecers’ taxes in either French or English, no test required.
The RAMQ policy seems like nothing more than sop to French-language hardliners for whom any amount of English spoken in Quebec is too much.