An Ontario hospital is trying to lure Quebec-trained health care workers by tapping into the controversy surrounding Quebec’s values charter.
Lakeridge Health is planning to run the ad, which features a woman wearing a headscarf, in a McGill University student newspaper. The ad says: “We don’t care what’s on your head. We care what’s in it.”
“We thought, given the controversy that’s going on in Quebec … maybe this would be an opportunity to create some awareness of what Lakeridge Health is,” said Kevin Empey, chief executive of the Oshawa-based hospital.
Empey said the hospital is in need of qualified medical staff and they chose to target the ad at McGill students because they have a strong medical program.
“Our hospital workforce and doctors are slowly becoming more diverse so we partly mean it as a signal of we’re open and we’re willing and there’s no issue in Durham Region, in Lakeridge,” he said.
Quebec’s proposed secular values charter, announced earlier this week by the Parti Québécois government, includes a provision that would prohibit public employees from wearing obvious religious symbols while performing their official duties.