(Quebec) Unusually, Christian Dubé presented his “game plan” to a parliamentary committee to pass his comprehensive healthcare reform before Christmas. Instead, the health minister is preparing the ground for the use of the gag order, says the opposition.
Published yesterday at 5:05 p.m.
On the first day, which marked the beginning of the home stretch of the parliamentary session, Minister Christian Dubé appeared in committee on Tuesday with “a proposed order” to complete the detailed study – article by article – of the imposing Bill 15. He has listened to it sufficiently and it is Time to move on to the next step.
“I will submit to the opposition members with whom we have worked a lot […] “From the start, a kind of game plan for the next three weeks,” explained Mr. Dubé when he arrived at the committee. “We’ve done 180 hours since the beginning and we still have 60 left […] and I think it’s very realistic to be able to do it [l’étude] of the bill before the end of the session,” he added.
Christian Dubé repeated more than once this fall his desire to pass his reform by the end of the session to create Santé Québec in the spring of 2024. Bill 15 provides a period of six months after its passage to establish this new state corporation.
The parliamentary session must end on December 8, after a week of regular work and two weeks of intensive work, meaning elected officials will sit for four days instead of three. According to Mr. Dubé, these 60 hours of work in the committee will be enough to review the hundreds of articles of the legislative text that have not yet been studied.
Bill 15, which aims to make the health and social services network more efficient, contains around 1,200 articles. So far, parliamentarians have adopted more than 560 articles and 325 amendments.
Instead of incorporating it into his future law, Christian Dubé ended up negotiating an agreement with medical specialists to impose new duties on them. This agreement, reached last week, represents an important element of his reform that does not need to be discussed in committee.
According to the minister, “two important issues” still need to be examined before the holidays: the territorial departments of medicine and the union leadership. Santé Québec will become the sole employer of the health and social services network. It is also expected that this will lead to union seniority pooling.
That’s a lot of 60 hours […]. I think if we work well, like we have been doing, we are capable.
Christian Dubé, Minister of Health
Towards resorting to a silence order?
The opposition agreed on Tuesday to “play along” with the minister’s game in blocks of articles in order to move the detailed study forward more quickly. However, by setting such a timetable, Mr. Dubé is sending the message that he will resort to a silence order after the 60 hours are up, the opposition believes.
The Minister of Health has not ruled out using this exceptional parliamentary procedure to pass his reform.
“When the minister arrives with a game plan for the next three weeks and we are told in the last week that we will study 400 articles, he is sending us the message that if that is not the case we will operate with a code of silence .”,” lamented the Liberal MP for Pontiac, André Fortin. According to him, “this is not the way to write such a poorly put together bill” that required so many changes.
According to Dubé’s roadmap, parliamentarians would adopt around a hundred amendments in the next two weeks and more than 400 in the week of December 5, most of which are articles of concord.
“I don’t want it, the minister said he didn’t want it, but realistically we will call it what it is: passing 400 articles in the last week […] I think we are able to do the mathematical calculations,” said Quebec Solidaire MP Guillaume Cliche-Rivard.
According to Parti Québécois, the deadlines cited by Mr. Dubé are “artificial,” while consideration of the bill could continue when work resumes in January. “We are creating an artificial pressure circumstance. “This doesn’t bode well given all the red lights, all the interventions that tell us to be careful,” said Chief Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.