(Quebec) In a cross-party offensive, the opposition made a final appeal to Minister Christian Dubé to refrain from using the gag order to pass his sweeping health care reform next week. He still refuses to exclude him.
Posted at 4:22 p.m.
“We have gathered here to ask Minister Dubé not to proceed with a silence order [le projet de loi] 15,” pleaded Solidarity MP Guillaume Cliche-Rivard. “We are talking about the second largest bill in the history of Parliament, with a number of amendments tabled every week. “The bill basically writes itself,” he added.
Mr Cliche-Rivard was joined on Thursday by his opposition colleagues, Liberal André Fortin and PQ Joël Arseneau – all of whom are involved in the detailed study of the reform – as well as representatives of several community groups and unions.
Today, hundreds of civil society organizations, groups and associations from the community, union, cooperative and medical sectors are joining together to call on Health Minister Christian Dubé not to back down and not to force the reform on Quebecers.
Nathalie Deziel, representative of the Health Solidarity Coalition
The groups present are calling on the minister to stop working “single-handedly” towards the adoption of his reform by the end of the parliamentary session, which ends on Friday December 8th. Last week, the Minister of Health presented his plan to pass the impressive legal text before the holidays.
“Let’s be very, very clear. The opposition have done an incredible job so far and when I submitted my game plan I said that it was certainly possible to pass it by the end of the year if we continued to work together in the same way. […] So far I am very, very confident,” Mr. Dubé said previously.
Bill 15, which will lead to the creation of Santé Québec, provides a period of six months after its passage to create this brand new public body that will become the sole employer of the health and social services network. Santé Québec will be responsible for the entire operational aspect of the ministry.
“Reform like this affects so many different aspects of the health network, community groups, unions, employees and will ultimately impact the network’s patients. We cannot do it too quickly, we cannot do it in a hurry,” said MP André Fortin.
A “fishtail” ending
So far, more than 600 of the approximately 1,200 articles of Bill 15 have been adopted, in addition to hundreds of amendments tabled by the minister. The latter also presented others this Thursday in a document that was around a hundred pages long. On Tuesday, Mr Dubé caused consternation in the union world when he proposed changes to increase the network’s employment categories from four to six.
“I take as an example the big changes in job categories two days ago,” said Mr. Arseneau. “The people who are primarily affected are not aware of it. “They don’t even have an opinion on it because they’re not sure they can measure the impact,” he complained, fearing that the detailed study of the bill would end “in fishtails.”
According to Mr Dubé’s roadmap, during the week of intensive work on December 5th, parliamentarians would adopt more than 400 amendments, most of them concordance articles.