The executive vice-president and chief operating officer of Hydro-Québec, Éric Filion, announced that he was leaving the Crown corporation on February 17. This is the second departure announcement by a senior Hydro-Québec executive in a few weeks, following the announcement of the resignation of the president and CEO, Sophie Brochu.
In a press release published on the Hydro-Quebec website on Tuesday, Éric Filion simply indicated that he wanted to start a “new chapter in his career”.
“I would like to salute Eric’s leadership qualities, in particular his ability to mobilize teams, as well as his great rigor,” wrote Ms. Brochu, who had herself announced his departure at the beginning of the month. of January, after three years in office.
“I consider myself privileged to have worked, over the past seven years, with a team that devotes itself daily to carrying out Hydro-Québec’s core mission and to customer service,” also writes Éric Filion in the press release.
The opposition is concerned about the independence of Hydro-Québec
In Quebec, the leader of the official opposition, Marc Tanguay, declared that he found that “it brews quite a lot at Hydro-Quebec” and that he was worried about the independence of the leaders of the state corporation. .
“You can have the best person as CEO of Hydro-Quebec, but if they don’t have a comprehensive plan for development, if they have Minister Fitzgibbon who is always over their shoulder […] then who manages it like a Dollarama? It will not work. »
According to the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, the messages sent by the government regarding Hydro-Quebec’s projects are contradictory.
“Last week, Mr. Fitzgibbon (Minister of the Economy and Energy) said that we won’t need a dam if we do so well in the development of two things, wind power, then electricity. energy efficiency, then there, today we learn that there will be a brief that will be tabled by Hydro-Québec, but we are going to talk about the construction of several dams. It takes a vision, it hurries. Then, during that time, it brews at Hydro Quebec. It is very worrying. »
In reaction to the resignation of Éric Filion, the solidarity leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois indicated that there is “most likely eel under rock” in this story.
Mr. Nadeau-Dubois reiterated his request to hold an emergency parliamentary committee to hear Sophie Brochu at the National Assembly.
“The energy transition, on this I agree with the Prime Minister, is the greatest challenge of the coming decades in Quebec, it cannot be decided behind closed doors, we have the right to know what happened to the senior management of Hydro-Québec” and “we have the right to know what the mission of Hydro-Québec is, it belongs to Quebecers”.
Parti Québécois spokesman Pascal Bérubé also expressed suspicions about the independence of Hydro-Québec leaders.
“I don’t know Mr. Filion’s reasons, but if people leave, you have to believe that they think they will be happier elsewhere, and how does the government explain that? You have to have a lot of faith in Pierre Fitzgibbon to consider that the sum of the advantages of his actions is greater than the sum of his disadvantages in terms of ethics and in terms of senior executive departures,” said the PQ MP.
An unchanged structure
In the Hydro-Québec press release published on Tuesday, it is written that the structure of the organization “remains unchanged. Régis Tellier, Vice-President – Operations and Maintenance, and Geneviève Fournier, Vice-President – Marketing and Customer Experience, will report to Sophie Brochu until further notice”.