The opposition parties consider it implausible that François Bonnardel, who was Minister of Transport during the last term, was unaware that his department had commissioned a study concerning a third link between Quebec and Lévis exclusively dedicated to public transport in the summer of 2022.
“I find that to say that the minister was not aware, it is incredible,” argued PQ MP Joël Arseneau, in a press briefing at the National Assembly. Especially since Mr. Bonnardel assured at the time that he was following the file “step by step”, he added.
On Thursday, Radio-Canada revealed that the Ministry of Transport (MTQ) had mandated, on June 30, the Union des Rives consortium to produce analyzes of public transport options only for the third link project.
Without clearly saying whether Mr. Bonnardel was aware, his office told Radio-Canada that “the minister knew that the ministry teams would carry out various analyzes to document the chosen project and its comparables”.
According to the interim leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, Marc Tanguay, it is impossible to be a minister and ignore such information. “Is there anything more important, if you are Minister of Transport of the Coalition avenir Québec, during the year 2022, than the third link project? You cannot be a minister and not be aware of what is going on in your ministry. »
The CAQ government lacked transparency by not revealing the existence of studies on other options than a highway link, argued Sol Zanetti, MP for Quebec solidaire. “Before the last election they were considering other things and then they kept us in the dark. And that, I think, is the thing that shocks me the most. It doesn’t matter whether we agree with a motorway tunnel or not, we had the right to know, we could have made up our minds. »
Asked about this, Infrastructure Minister Jonatan Julien replied that it was “normal for the MTQ to consider several scenarios”.
On April 20, the current Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Geneviève Guilbault, presented a new version of the third link project. This one abandons the cars in favor of a tunnel reserved exclusively for public transport.
Further details will follow.
With Alexandre Robillard