(Quebec) Unusually, Christian Dubé submitted his “game plan” to a parliamentary committee to adopt his vast health reform before Christmas. The Minister of Health is instead preparing the ground for the use of the gag order, believes the opposition.
On the first day marking the start of the home stretch of the parliamentary session, Minister Christian Dubé appeared in committee on Tuesday with “a proposed sequence” to complete the detailed study – article by article study – of the the imposing Bill 15. According to him, he has listened sufficiently and it is time to move on to the next step.
“I am going to submit to the oppositions, with whom we have collaborated a lot […] from the beginning, a kind of game plan for the next three weeks,” explained Mr. Dubé upon his arrival in committee. “Since the beginning, we have done 180 hours, we have 60 left […] and I think it is very realistic to be able to finish [l’étude] of the bill before the end of the session,” he added.
Christian Dubé repeated more than once this fall that his wish is to adopt his reform by the end of the session to create Santé Québec in the spring of 2024. Bill 15 provides for a period of six months after its adoption to constitute this brand new state corporation.
The parliamentary session must end on December 8, after a week of regular work and two weeks of intensive work, which means that elected officials will sit for four days instead of three. According to Mr. Dubé, these 60 hours of work in committee will be sufficient to review the hundreds of articles of the legislative text which have not yet been studied.
Bill 15, which aims to make the health and social services network more efficient, contains some 1,200 articles. Parliamentarians have so far adopted more than 560 articles and 325 amendments.
Rather than including it in his future law, Christian Dubé finally negotiated an agreement with specialist doctors to subject them to new obligations. This agreement concluded last week constitutes an important element of his reform which will not have to be debated in committee.
In the minister’s opinion, there remain “two important issues” to study between now and the holidays: territorial departments of medicine and union governance. Santé Québec will become the sole employer of the health and social services network. It is also expected that this will result in the merger of union seniority.
That’s a lot of 60 hours […] I think that if we work well, as we have done well until now, we are capable.
Christian Dubé, Minister of Health
Towards recourse to a gag order?
The opposition agreed on Tuesday to “play the game” of the minister of proceeding in blocks of articles to advance the detailed study more quickly. However, Mr. Dubé, by giving himself a timetable like this, sends the message that he will resort to a gag order once the 60 hours have passed, believes the opposition.
The Minister of Health has not ruled out the use of this exceptional parliamentary procedure to have his reform adopted.
“When the minister arrives with a game plan for the next three weeks and in the last week, we are told we are going to study 400 articles, he sends us the message that if it is not that, we will operate by gag order,” lamented the Liberal MP for Pontiac, André Fortin. According to him, “this is not the way to do such a poorly put together bill” which required so many amendments.
According to Mr. Dubé’s roadmap, parliamentarians would adopt around a hundred amendments for the next two weeks and more than 400 in the week of December 5, the majority of which are concordance articles.
“I don’t want it, the minister said he didn’t want it, but realistically we’re going to call a spade a spade: adopt 400 articles in the last week […] I think we are capable of doing the mathematical calculations,” said Quebec Solidaire MP Guillaume Cliche-Rivard.
According to the Parti Québécois, the deadlines mentioned by Mr. Dubé “are artificial” while the study of the bill could resume when work resumes in January. “We are creating an artificial circumstance of pressure. “It doesn’t bode well, given all the red lights, all the interventions, which ask us to be careful,” indicated Chief Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.