The famous “refoundation plan” of the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, is only a “copy and paste of the last electoral campaign”, a “collection of slogans” and an “acknowledgment of failure” on the part of of the Legault government, launched the opposition parties on Thursday, after the main lines of the plan were disclosed in the media.
The content of the document, which must be presented to the public on Tuesday, was revealed in the morning by Radio-Canada. The plan emphasizes that the government has given itself three years for the health network to be “significantly strengthened and modernized”. It takes up the electoral commitments of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ).
The CAQ promise to give all Quebecers access to a family doctor — made in 2012, then in 2018, and again last November — is thus transformed into a commitment to allow access to a health professional within a 36 hours, as stated in the budget tabled on Tuesday. The desire to transform the remuneration of doctors, also promised in 2018, also appears in the plan.
A series of other commitments announced in recent months or in the most recent budget can also be found there. This is the case with the expansion of an access window project implemented in Bas-Saint-Laurent. The triage service, often cited as an example by the Minister of Health, is used to direct orphan patients to various health professionals who, most often, are not doctors.
The same goes for the increased role of pharmacists, in particular in hospitals, or the creation of “command centers”, named “emergency coordinators to ensure optimal planning of hospital care” in the budget.
A “collection of slogans”
In the opinion of the opposition, Minister Dubé’s plan is nothing more than a marketing operation and an admission by the CAQ regarding its inability to fulfill its election promises. ” [Les] 50 measures that have been announced, one has the impression that it is a copy and paste of the last election campaign. So, an acknowledgment of failure, ”launched the liberal leader Dominique Anglade.
She recalled that “more than a million Quebecers” are waiting for a family doctor. In fact, this number would be 1.5 million according to what Minister Dubé declared in November. “We are talking about 160,000 people who are waiting for surgery today, the wait in the emergency room which has increased. Once again, all the lights are red,” continued Ms. Anglade.
MP Vincent Marissal, from Québec solidaire, called the plan a “collection of slogans”. “Once again, this government and Minister Dubé are announcing much more than they are delivering,” he said.
He expressed concern about the government’s openness to private agencies, which he would like to supervise better according to the information contained in the plan. “Here we learn [que] the CAQ has become infatuated with the use of private agencies. […] The private siphons off the public. So after telling us: “it’s appalling, we have to put an end to this”, we are telling ourselves: “we are going to keep them, then we are going to normalize their situation”, denounced the elected official. He said he feared that the use of private agencies would indeed perpetuate the use of “compulsory overtime”.
The Parti Québécois was cautious in its comments on the plan, preferring to wait for its official unveiling before reacting to it. Still, “at some point, the discussion will have to focus on what the CAQ has actually done or not done for four years,” said Chief Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.
He also expressed concern about the piling up of bills a few weeks before the end of the parliamentary session. “Look at the bills piling up: it looks like it’s a government that hasn’t considered all these questions, which are fundamental” before the “last weeks”, he underlined. .
On the side of Québec Solidaire, Vincent Marissal also underlined the “difficulty” of the government in managing its legislative agenda. “But we are not fooled. And I said this to the minister yesterday: “what you are doing is preparing for the end of the session in June, you are going to stand up here and then say: it is the fault of the nasty oppositions!” “, he launched. “I hope they didn’t do it on purpose, because that would really be taking Parliament for a ridiculous useless knick-knack. »