All the green banners of the Inter-union Common Front, tens of thousands of people invaded the streets of Montreal on Saturday to loudly demand a dignified and respectful employment contract. It must be admitted that the context of shortages, salary delays and network overload forces the government to seriously question what its public services are worth and what it is prepared to agree to financially to restore them.
Friday, while the demonstrators were preparing their signs, the Public Protector sent a powerful message, which did not escape the unions. As an opening to his Annual report 2022-2023, Marc-André Dowd questions the harmful effects of the labor shortage in the public sectors, particularly on the quality and personalization of services. “At the scale of public services […]lack of personnel cannot become the ready-made excuse to legitimize shortcomings and violations of rights,” he writes, calling for the mobilization of the authorities to break this impasse.
This annual report tells the sad, sometimes tragic story of people, “including some of the most deprived in society”, who did not have access to the public services they had the right to expect. The protector lists them: undue delays, loss of documents, errors, reductions in services, congestion of telephone lines, rigid administrative decisions. Unsurprisingly, the key sector of health and social services has a gloomy record: this network suffers from a mathematical equation doomed to failure, because the needs of the population are growing, and access access to professional resources is increasingly difficult.
Mr. Dowd’s findings are not surprising, because the last three years have served to measure the draconian effect of the lack of human resources and the overload imposed on those who remain, especially in the education and health. These two pillar structures of Quebec are cracking. Retention and attractiveness are lacking. The unions are right to deplore this.
The union members also brandish the latest report from the Institut de la tourisme du Québec (ISQ) on the state and evolution of employee compensation in 2022. It confirmed a salary delay of nearly 12% compared to the other Quebec employees, and 8.7% compared to the private sector. If we take into account social benefits, hours of work and salary, public sector employees lag behind other employees by almost 4%. To these contextual elements, we can add the 30% salary increase recently paid to deputies of the National Assembly, to better match the private sector in particular. And a proposal to increase the salaries of Sûreté du Québec police officers by 21% over five years – incredible, but true, they rejected this offer by a proportion of almost 60% in mid-September.
Negotiations are intensifying between Quebec and the four major union centers, which will continue to solicit their 420,000 members until mid-October to collect strike votes. We have entered into an act of negotiation which allows us to clearly measure the distance between the positions of the two parties. Quebec estimates that inflation over the next five years will be around 11.5%, and this is what it is offering state employees over five years, in addition to opening the door to differentiated offers, for example for nurses. The Common Front hopes for a three-year contract, and it wants to introduce into collective agreements a permanent indexation mechanism based on the CPI (consumer price index). His request is therefore $100 per week for the first year or CPI + 2%; the CPI + 3% in the second year; and the CPI + 4% the last. We can easily predict that the use of strikes, occasional if not unlimited, will be used this fall.
Despite a context where they have compelling arguments, the unions will not be able to hide the financial framework in which Quebec receives these requests. The Prime Minister, François Legault, and his President of the Treasury Board, Sonia LeBel, are working with deficit budget margins: Quebec posted a deficit of $4.57 billion in 2022-2023. Each percentage point of salary increase for public sector employees will cost an additional $600 million. Quebec’s ability to pay must obviously determine the room for maneuver that Quebec is prepared to grant.
We can of course also hope that the intensification of pressure tactics will not disrupt citizens’ daily lives too much, even if that is indeed how we build a balance of power. But what, ultimately, is this argument about? Citizens, as the Public Protector rightly points out, are already suffering every day and in many ways from the impoverishment and weakening of our public sectors.