(Gatineau) The Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, is looking for a political legacy, but his Bill 15 is “wobbly”, accuses Vincent Marissal, of Québec solidaire (QS).
In the press scrum at the QS congress in Gatineau, Mr. Marissal suspected Mr. Dubé of being in a hurry to adopt his major health reform before leaving politics.
He anticipates that the minister will force the adoption of Bill 15 by gag order between now and December 8, and that he will place the blame on the opposition parties.
However, the opposition will refuse to “wear the hat,” declared Mr. Marissal. “He builds the plane in mid-flight with boat parts and he doesn’t know where he’s going,” he lambasted.
“He is in the process of shopping for a legacy with Santé Québec, […]but should we rush through a shaky bill to please a minister who wants to leave his legacy somewhere?
“The legacy is that emergencies are overflowing, […] women wait three years to have a mammogram. […] This is the real legacy of the government at the moment,” he added.
The voluminous Bill 15 would create the Santé Québec agency, which would be responsible for coordinating the network’s operations. The ministry would concentrate mainly on defining the main orientations.
The Santé Québec agency would become the sole employer for the health and social services network; the CISSS and CIUSSS would be integrated into it.
Because there would be a single employer, union certifications would be merged. We are also aiming for a single seniority list, which would allow staff mobility from one region to another.
QS MP Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, who is participating in the study of Bill 15, warns that it would be risky to adopt Bill 15 without having dealt with “the shovelful” of amendments tabled by the minister.
“Listen, just on Friday, we received around fifty amendments at 4 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., […] and it’s like that every day, he said. If we do this in an accelerated manner with a gag, there will be huge errors. »
According to Mr. Cliche-Rivard, there would remain between 600 and 700 articles to study, out of the 1,200 in the bill. Several of these articles are concordance articles, Mr. Dubé pointed out earlier this week.
He recalled that the deputies had already spent 180 hours in parliamentary committee.