Emergency triage in pandemic times in Quebec: The tool as a micropolitical strategy for the administration of living human beings
In Quebec, the COVID-19 crisis highlighted the implementation of a triage protocol by the Quebec government without being publicly announced. It has been criticized for its discrimination against people with disabilities and seniors in accessing resources. The article seeks to consider the triage tool as a micropolitics in a larger framework in order to better understand the utilitarian orientation of this sanitary crisis. The choice as to the allocation of resources is based on a calculation between the survival potential of people and the cost of this effort to preserve the hospital system, and discrimination quickly sets in when the choice is made. The article shows, through an analysis of the triage machine and the arrangement from which it derives its military and imperial origin during the Napoleonic wars, but also that the protocol tends to externalize and automate decisions formerly made by doctors. The point is rooted in a political consideration both of an evident ableism by the health infrastructure but also of a biopolitical arrangement that produces it and transmits it through its machines.