Quebec is cleaning up its bonuses and incentives related to the COVID-19 pandemic. A dozen programs will end next month, including the 4% and 8% “COVID-19 bonuses” offered since the start of the pandemic to healthcare workers.
This announcement falls on the same day as the commemoration of the victims of the pandemic, two years after what many consider the start of the health crisis in Quebec. Expected next week by the unions, it finally arrived by press release on Friday.
In addition to the “COVID bonuses”, offered in the health network since April 2020, Quebec is axing the “double time” pay offered to workers who have been working overtime since the start of the fifth wave. The “staircase bonus”, an amount intended to encourage regular attendance and which could reach $1,000 per four-week period, will end, as will the lump sum offered to part-time staff who work more than 30 hours per week. .
It was already planned that these financial measures would disappear in April. It is on April 16, more precisely, that they will do so. “In accordance with the government’s desire to end the state of health emergency, the ministerial orders issued under the decree on the state of health emergency will possibly be repealed. Thus, the measures attached to it will be abolished, ”summarized the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS).
Quebec must table a bill this month that will formalize the exit from the state of health emergency. Prime Minister François Legault maintains that it has become necessary to make permanent some of the bonuses offered using the exceptional powers of the Public Health Act. “There will be a few [de mesures] afterwards, but maybe it is possible to frame them in a bill,” he said in February.
This is particularly the case for the retention and attractiveness bonuses of $12,000 and $18,000 offered to nurses since last September. These amounts established by means of a ministerial decree are not part of those that Quebec will abandon next month.
The MSSS estimates that it has paid “more than $5.3 billion” in bonuses and incentives since the start of the pandemic.