Summoned to live with the virus, the whole of Quebec is learning to gauge its new freedoms. Yet resists Bill 28, aimed at ending the state of health emergency, which divided the parliamentary committee on health this week. In dissonance with the times — Montreal will lift its state of emergency next week, without further ado; the ROC has been living without for a long time — the project drawn up by the Minister of Health Christian Dubé renews the CAQ management by decrees and decrees until the end of the year.
This unnecessary legislative detour seems even more dubious now that the Auditor General has shown, through the example of personal protective equipment (PPE), what this type of management can cost the community.
Started very late and in the greatest disorganization, the painful race for PPE will have cost the Quebec government nearly a billion dollars too much, assessed the Auditor General. That’s a lot, even if we agree that in such a storm, Quebec will not have been the only one to pay for its PPE in a delirious market.
We are still surprised to read in the report filed Wednesday by Guylaine Leclerc that the famous Center for Government Acquisitions, born in the wake of the health disaster, once pandemic management was well established, did not always check supplier integrity or PPE compliance. This laxity also has a cost, deplores the VG. He will have dug additional losses of nearly 15 million and forced legal proceedings of just over 170 million against suppliers who have failed in their commitments.
What the AG’s report suggests above all, implicitly, is that a thorough examination of the mutual agreement contracts granted under the screen of the pandemic regime could reveal other agreements signed to the detriment of the greatest number. Loudly demanded by the opposition, a complete “event report” was promised for the spring by a Legault government that we know is reluctant to open its books. Let’s hope he will do it with better grace and, above all, with more efficiency than he did when he made public the recommendations transmitted by Public Health at the heart of the pandemic.
Wanting to be reassuring for the months to come, the Minister of Health has pledged in these pages not to sign new contracts. The fact remains that he is asking in the same breath for everything necessary to have free rein to face a seventh wave. If he is so attached to his “very small” and “very simple” Bill 28, it is because it comes to guarantee, he says, his “agility” on several fronts, in particular that of contracts and labor. -work. Without the staff of the “I contribute” program, which allowed him to recruit outside collective agreements and professional orders, the Minister does not see how he will be able to carry out a mass vaccination operation this fall. Especially not with the “hot summer” that is taking shape in a health network showing generalized fatigue.
Nothing works. Unanimously decried by the opposition, who sees it as an electoral screen, the bill also made a majority of health workers and lawyers wince. In desperation, Mr. Dubé wanted us to believe this week that, without this legislation, Quebec might have no choice but to resort to load shedding. It’s strong coffee. Renewed 112 times so far, the state of emergency will not have protected Quebecers from this measure. It is difficult to see how “transitional measures”, which he himself describes as “accommodations”, could materialize this miracle. And at what price.
Not to mention that, symbolically, the possibility of having to resort to a gag to put an end to the health emergency seems contradictory to say the least. The solution is however under our noses – in the Public Health Act, in the section “Declaration of a state of health emergency”, which it would be enough to dust off -, said in turn those who presented themselves in parliamentary committee. This is where we should put our energies. Not only would the exercise allow us to prepare for the next wave, but it would set the stage for the next pandemic. Even if no one is prepared to consider this eventuality, it is nevertheless one of the duties given to Minister Dubé by the Health and Welfare Commissioner, Joanne Castonguay. It shouldn’t be forgotten.