(Quebec) The lifting of the state of health emergency will also signal the end of the exceptional powers to award contracts without a call for tenders. Quebec has promised accountability by the end of the session in June. The President of the Treasury Board, Sonia LeBel, already assures that there has been no favoritism as feared by the opposition.
Posted at 5:22 p.m.
“I can assure Quebecers that we have put in place all the mechanisms to prevent favoritism,” argued Ms.me LeBel in a press scrum on Tuesday.
The Legault government has awarded 4.1 billion contracts under the health emergency decree in 2020-2021, according to the report Statistics on the contracts of public bodies, published Tuesday by the secretariat of the Treasury Board. These amounts apply to the execution of 2,688 contracts over $25,000.
The figures for 2021-2022 are not yet recorded, but expensive contracts have also been awarded by mutual agreement. One need only think of the massive purchase of rapid screening tests or N95 masks during the Omicron wave.
“All these contracts were awarded under the Act [sur l’état d’urgence sanitaire] and, according to my information, they were necessary,” said Mr.me LeBel. Quebec has also defended itself from lacking transparency since all contracts are published on the government’s electronic tendering system.
“The Autorité des marchés publics also has full authority to look at these contracts and do its job,” added the President of the Treasury Board.
The Legault government has the obligation to present within three months of the end of the state of health emergency an “event report” in which it must detail “the intervention measures implemented and the powers exercised”. under the Public Health Act, which includes the awarding of contracts.
“I am committed to having it tabled before June,” Prime Minister François Legault reiterated on Tuesday.
The opposition feared that this report could not be presented before the end of the parliamentary session and therefore before the elections. It is that the state of health emergency will only be lifted once the transition bill of the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, has been adopted in the National Assembly.
Minister Dubé is due to present his legislative text on Wednesday aimed at ending the state of health emergency in Quebec, after two years of a pandemic. In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Dubé explained that his bill must establish “operational” mechanisms to allow the government to react quickly in the event of a new wave.
François Legault’s chief of staff, Martin Koskinen, also told The Press that the government wants to keep at its disposal a “minimum” of powers, “without being obliged to declare a health emergency” to exercise them. Such as the payment of bonuses, the imposition of wearing a mask in public transport or maintaining “already signed” over-the-counter contracts.
“Risks of slippage”, according to the opposition
The high volume of contracts awarded under the health emergency raises fears in the opposition that certain groups or companies may have taken advantage of favoritism. In their eyes and those of several experts, the Legault government has also maintained the state of health emergency in Quebec for too long.
“There are risks of enormous slippages”, launched the liberal leader, Dominique Anglade. “The reason we call for tenders is so that there is no favouritism,” she added. According to her, there is “clear appearance of a problem with the management of contracts” by the government.
The leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, said he was “worried” by a “government that has been clinging to this point, for months, to governance by decree to give contracts without appeal of offers”.
“We can talk about Jean Charest for a very long time, then about his dark era of governance, but we should open our eyes to what is happening at the moment,” he said in a scrum. “The logic of the call for tenders is to avoid favouritism, to avoid what we discovered at the Charbonneau commission”.
The deputy of Québec solidaire, Vincent Marissal, for his part, directly challenged Mr.me LeBel: “I don’t know how she feels to see this multiplication of contracts because she was at the Charbonneau commission and she saw very well that from the moment we let our guard down […] it’s the open door, ”he said.
The main interested party was quick to reply: “The chief prosecutor of the Charbonneau commission would tell you that we are absolutely not at all in the same situation”.
Excluding those granted under the state of health emergency, the Legault government awarded 14,467 contracts by mutual agreement for a value of 3.07 billion in 2020-2021, which totals approximately 21% of the whole. contracts given in Quebec. This is the average of recent years, according to Mme LeBel.