Pleading the urgency of improving patient service, Minister Christian Dubé will have his vast reform of the health network adopted under gag order. But with some 650 articles still under study, Québec solidaire believes that this is a botched bill whose shortcomings will be discovered too late.
The Minister of Health was in a bad mood when he appeared before the parliamentary press on Friday.
“I’m a little tired of seeing what’s happening in our network, people waiting in the emergency room, people dying in the emergency room, people who aren’t able to get an appointment with their doctor, waiting lists. I’m tired of this,” declared Christian Dubé.
“With every day that we lose, we have dangers in our emergencies,” he added a little later.
After 238 hours of study in parliamentary committee, the Legault government has therefore decided to impose a gag order on Bill 15. Elected officials will have to sit in the evening, and perhaps even tonight or tomorrow, in order to proceed with its adoption accelerated.
With this umpteenth reform of the health network, Quebec wishes to create a new agency, Santé Québec, which will become the sole employer of the network and will take charge of daily operations.
During his end-of-session report, Prime Minister François Legault linked health and education reforms to ongoing negotiations with public sector employees. In all cases, it is about obtaining more flexibility from unions and making managers more accountable.
“At the moment, the state of the networks is, in some cases, difficult because it lacks flexibility,” he said.
Concerns
But this speedy adoption worries the opposition parties, since some 650 articles have still not been studied, out of the 1,200 contained in the bill. Mr. Dubé’s team estimates that 80 remaining articles concern content, the rest being concordance with other laws.
According to the oppositions, there are more than 200 content articles that remain under study, several of which modify prehospital services.
“He tabled a bill that is all crooked, that is gargantuan, that we are forced to repair with a hammer and a plane every day,” railed the Quebec Solidaire MP, Vincent Marissal, in reference to the hundreds of amendments tabled by the minister himself since the start of the work.
“The Prime Minister is preparing to commit the worst mistake of his mandate,” said the interim leader of the Liberal Party, Marc Tanguay.
His colleague, André Fortin, also recalled that Minister Dubé acknowledged last week that he did not understand the scope of an amendment concerning English-speaking hospitals.
Adopted without study
But the government’s parliamentary leader assures that Quebecers can trust the state’s lawyers, who drafted the elements still under study. “They are competent people, professional people,” assures Simon Jolin-Barrette.
PQ critic Joël Arseneau, however, argues that the bill has been greatly modified since its tabling last March. “Just yesterday, at 4:40 p.m., we received new amendments,” he underlined.