The unreserved support of former Health Minister Gaétan Barrette for the agency that his successor Christian Dubé intends to create should in itself worry Quebecers, judge Québec solidaire (QS) and the Parti québécois (PQ). The Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ), he is less lapidary.
“Me, to see Gaétan Barrette applauding a health reform, it worries me a lot,” said solidarity co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. Not without irony, PQ MP Pascal Bérubé noted that “the first significant support from Minister Christian Dubé, [c’était] Gaetan Barrette”. “I’ll stop there, then. Do I need to add more? »
The Minister of Health is due to table an ambitious bill on Wednesday to create an agency outside his ministry. However, rightly or wrongly, the last reform of the health care system, led 10 years ago by Gaétan Barrette, has left Quebecers with bad memories.
Called Santé Québec, this new agency would take charge of the day-to-day management of the network, leaving it to the ministry to set its longer-term orientations. This is one of the pillars of the plan presented a year ago by Minister Dubé.
The reform would also impose new obligations on medical specialists in hospitals and would attack the rule of staff seniority, according to information released by The Press and applauded by Gaétan Barrette ever since.
On Tuesday, Premier François Legault also mentioned that he wants to reduce the power of local unions with the bill. “There are currently local negotiations which can be blocked by local unions. We would like that to be no longer possible,” he said of the nurses’ unions.
No need for a world war, according to Tanguay
The PLQ – to which Mr. Barrette belonged – also had to comment on this outing on Tuesday. Its interim chief, Marc Tanguay, initially distanced himself from the ex-minister’s remarks to the effect that the reform was going to trigger a “third world war” between the government and the project’s critics: “I think that those who are on the waiting list[en] don’t need. »
Regarding the reproaches made by Mr. Barrette to the effect that the PLQ would have prevented him from creating a similar agency at the time, Mr. Tanguay also said he was “happy” that there was no there was no ‘World War III’ under the former Liberal government.
But Christian Dubé promises that “there will be no world war” this time either. “I’m not [une personne] of confrontation. […] I have proven it in the past, ”he said without hurting the ex-minister Barrette.
To a journalist who questioned him about the support of the latter, Mr. Dubé replied that he was going to “take the support of all Quebecers”. “People recognize that the status quo is not acceptable,” he also slipped.