Many of us believe that this strike must be an opportunity for common reflections on Quebec’s national destiny. This text is a contribution in this direction. The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government tasted almost absolute power during the pandemic and no longer knows how to return to democracy and its structures of collective intelligence based on the sharing of powers and responsibilities.
Many of us are equipped to generally understand public affairs, why is it that many of us are not able to say more about the Education and Health laws that have been tabled in recent months, otherwise that these are programs of centralization of powers around ministers and their small groups of advisors?
Ministers Bernard Drainville for Education and Christian Dubé for Health are in the process of creating a State of small, omnipotent “leaders”. However, we believe that the opposite would be desirable: decentralization, small, agile decision-making structures in phase with their environment; structuring national ideological frameworks, autonomy of action and responsibility attributable to individuals on the ground. Not mammoth structures with a towering mammoth at the top followed by a line of intermediaries all equipped to say “I’m just carrying out orders.” This is so not the right direction, and it is so obvious that we are surprised by such a marked trend in Quebec, especially when thinking about the general state of knowledge proven on such questions relating to the management of human organizations.
Last Saturday, December 9, on the show Facts First moderated by Alain Gravel, Damien Contandriopoulos, professor at the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Montreal and specialist in public health in Canada, clearly stated that, in his opinion, the Dubé reform would change absolutely nothing in the quality services to the population. We recently heard on the news a manager (perhaps a doctor) stating the obvious: two reforms to health structures in ten years is too many. It requires too much effort to adapt to the system and its actors, “can we try to do better with what has already been done? [même si ça a mal été fait, entendions-nous dans ses mots] “.
What do they want from the government when all the floodgates are open for the development of private medicine and the players in the health system are hemorrhaging in this direction? What is the purpose of this law imposed this week in Health? How is it that we are generally incapable of naming its general ins and outs?
Meanwhile, we are negotiating collective agreements for state workers, and almost no one can say what is really blocking or why at the sectoral tables in Health and Education. And in this, the union movement is not clearer towards its members or the population.
From all these observations, we must therefore conclude that obscurity everywhere in public affairs is never good news for the common democratic good, and it is time that we ask for light on what is happening in this society and its institutions, of which we are the members and the driving forces.