End The Délai De Carence

The Health Care For All Campaign has been a joint initiative of the Immigrant Workers' Centre, Project Genesis and Pinay, demanding the abolition of the waiting period for Medicare imposed on migrants to Quebec and the extension of free healthcare to all, including undocumented the longer term). Since 2001, all new residents in Quebec, especially immigrants and temporary workers, have had to wait three months after their declared arrival before being covered by public health insurance(the Délai De Carence, or DDC).

More than 40,000 landed immigrants and temporary workers per year face this exclusion in Quebec. Under the DDC, new immigrants and temporary workers get stuck in the bottom tier of healthcare. The DDC is part of a larger trend toward the privatization and the Quebec and Canadian Healthcare systems. The costs of this policy are borne by new immigrants, to the profit of private insurance companies.

In the analysis of the IWC, the DDC ignores provincial, federal and international human rights by refusing immigrants and temporary workers their right to physical and mental health. In theory, those rights should be exercised without discrimination of any kind. In reality, 84 percent of people not receiving Medicare for three months are new immigrants! For live-in caregivers and other temporary, they may even go through more than one three-month delay, facing major obstacles to protecting health.

When the DDC was implemented, the IWC started to see cases of people not getting healthcare when they needed it, or--nearly as bad--people being saddled with debt into the tens of thousands of dollars. Convinced that this was discriminatory and bad for Quebec society overall, the IWC teamed up with a number of other organizations to work on a campaign to abolish the DDC. Project Genesis, a neighbourhood social-rights organizations, and again, Pinay (which represents many live-in caregivers) are the two other partners in the co-ordinating committee. We also have support from more than twenty other organizations, including the biggest immigrant-serving coalitions in Quebec.

The strategy has been to target the health minister and provincial insurance board (RAMQ) to pressure them to remove the regulation from the books. Tactics have ranged from press conferences, to camping out in front of the health minister's office, to public education on these issues, to supporting individual families facing DDC debt.