The Quebec Press Council overturned on appeal the absolution first granted to The Press and to one of its journalists following a grievance of incomplete information which related to an editorial from March 2023 about public funding of private ambulance transport companies.
Published yesterday at 10:00 p.m.
The complainant, Maxime Séguin, criticized Philippe Mercure, then editorialist, for having disseminated inaccurate and incomplete information in this text entitled “Last chance for ambulances”.
In a passage of the editorial, it was mentioned that “in short, Quebec is paying the private sector without knowing if the money is well spent” and that the bill “approaches a billion dollars each year.”
However, the complainant argued that this amount did not represent reality since it included “the public, the private, the CCS [Centres de Communication Santé] and other expenses.
In November 2023, the online version of the text was modified and a correction was added at the end of the article. This new version mentions that “according to the Ministry of Health, the invoice [pour les entreprises privées] amounts to approximately $600 million each year.
Taking this into account, the Press Council accepted the complaint of incomplete information, but granted an absolution to The Press and to the journalist in his first decision. The complaint of inaccurate information was rejected.
An absolution withdrawn on appeal
On appeal, the plaintiff argued that the figure mentioned in the correction still included Urgences-santé, which is not a private company; which means that it is overvalued, according to him, by around 20%.
The Press responded that this was the information provided to the journalist on March 22, 2023 by the media relations of the Ministry of Health and Social Services of Quebec, who estimated that approximately 600 million was paid to private companies paramedics.
However, the Department released official data between the initial publication of the article and the addition of the fix, which shows that this figure is more like $500 million. The Press argued that this figure was not available at the time the editorial was published and that the correction applied to information published at that time. The appeals committee rejected this interpretation and deemed the correction “erroneous”.
For this reason, she withdrew the absolution granted in first instance, and blamed the journalist and The Press for incomplete information.
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