A week after tabling a highly deficit budget, Quebec finally reached an agreement with Ottawa on health transfers worth nearly a billion per year.
The agreement, valid for ten years, will allow Quebec to receive an additional $900 million per year to finance its health services. It concerns the general envelope of health transfers from the federal government. It does not include compensation for dental care and drug insurance of at least $2.9 billion that the Legault government is still demanding.
“It’s not at all up to what we wanted to have […] But it will give us resources to continue to do the work,” declared the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, Tuesday afternoon.
Originally, Quebec and the rest of Canada hoped to raise six times more, but they were rejected by the Trudeau government.
The two parties had until March 31 to conclude this agreement, talks of which have dragged on for months.
Quebec is also the last province in Canada to reach an agreement with the federal government. Some having reached agreements in principle with Ottawa more than a year ago.
According to our information, the talks broke down on Friday on the sidelines of the meeting between Justin Trudeau and François Legault in Montreal. Mr. Trudeau then said he was confident of reaching a consensus before the end of March.
Dispute over funds and terms
From the start, the negotiations stumbled over Quebec’s refusal to be accountable to the federal government for the use of funds. Ottawa normally wanted to have access to certain specific data to produce comparisons between the provinces or Quebec.
On Tuesday, Minister Dubé’s office made a point of emphasizing that it was an agreement “without conditions” and reiterated that health is an exclusive area of Quebec’s jurisdiction. In this context, the data transmitted to Ottawa will be limited, according to Quebec, to those which are already online on the dashboard of the Ministry of Health.
The funds associated with this agreement had already been included in the budget tabled last week. Despite this, the Legault government reiterated that the amounts were not sufficient.
“For Quebec, the amounts offered by the federal government in health are clearly insufficient. They will not make it possible to catch up with the level of the historic federal contribution, nor to ensure sustainable funding for health, we read in the budget.
Originally, the premiers of the provinces unanimously requested that federal funding increase from 22 to 35% of health spending. However, the agreement will maintain this share at around 20% by 2040.
With Sandrine Vieira