Arriving at his caucus last week, Prime Minister François Legault asked his deputies to “refocus” on the five priorities of his party since its founding: education, economy, health, environment and protection of our identity.
Question: is there anything the Quebec government does that does not fall directly or indirectly under one or other of these chapter headings? However, in politics, when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
Mr. Legault left the National Assembly in December asking Santa Claus to give him a compass. Obviously he hasn’t found it yet.
In any case, not this type of compass which allows a government to be given precise priorities. He is only in the second year of his mandate, but he gives the impression of struggling more than of having a precise road map.
Especially since public finances are not doing well. The public sector negotiations cost more than expected and it will therefore be necessary to borrow more, the Minister of Finance, Eric Girard, has already explained.
The Prime Minister promised Sherbrooke that there would be budgetary rigor, but no austerity. He should talk to his predecessor. Philippe Couillard always spoke of rigor, but it was the word “austerity” that still stood out. It will not take many cuts in public services for this to happen again.
That said, certain priorities are self-evident, and if the Legault government wants to make a fresh start, it should already know that there are major issues that are far from being resolved.
First, whatever one may think, the public sector negotiations are not over. There is no agreement with the nurses and, in education, it is not at all certain that the agreement reached at the table will be ratified when everyone has spoken.
The government believed that it could pretty much solve everything by putting a little more money on the table, but several unions rejected this approach.
The major issue remains working conditions, and the dissatisfaction of union members is evident, which explains the difficulty in having the new collective agreements ratified.
“It is not true that all the problems can be monetized. On the contrary. These must be working conditions which, in the medium and long term, make all the difference in the public health network,” Julie Bouchard, president of the FIQ, recently recalled. Obviously, the government does not have the same vision of things.
The housing crisis should also be a government priority. But the weakness of the minister responsible does not inspire the greatest confidence. It is a crisis which, however, affects the whole of Quebec, from the mainland to the smallest towns in the regions.
The Legault government created the Quebec Affordable Housing Program (PHAQ) two years ago.
But according to the Société d’habitation du Québec, only 46 housing units financed by the PHAQ are currently “under construction” and none are in operation.
To give an idea of the order of magnitude of the problem, let’s take the example of Quebec City. The administration of Mayor Bruno Marchand would like to double construction starts to meet demand, at a rate of 5,000 new units per year for the next three years.
It is not surprising that last month, when Minister France-Élaine Duranceau announced the construction of 1,000 new subsidized social housing units, the reaction from groups interested in housing issues was far from joyous.
But in addition to these two emergencies to be resolved, it will be necessary to monitor the long-term effects of the structural changes that were adopted at the end of the last session in education and health.
In both cases, it was essentially an exercise in the concentration of powers in the hands of the minister, in the case of education, and the new “top gun” in that of the Santé Québec agency.
Except that the centralization of powers is not necessarily a guarantee of efficiency and better management. Even though history tends to show us the opposite.
But you have to give the runner a chance and say to yourself that, all the same, here is an effort to find long-term solutions to recurring problems.
Because if Prime Minister Legault ends up finding his compass, it should indicate to him that he must work in the long term and avoid cosmetic solutions, and public relations exercises, as he has done too often, in particularly in the linguistic file.
Mr. Legault still has almost three years before the next elections and a super-majority in the National Assembly. It would be a shame to continue to waste such a mandate.