Posted at 5:00 am
(Quebec) The President of the Treasury Board, Sonia LeBel, denies that her discussion forums go outside the legal framework of the negotiations affecting the health and education sectors. Rather, she sees it as a way to make the “difficult” process of renewing the collective agreements of civil servants more efficient.
In an interview with La Presse, Sonia LeBel claims that conducting negotiations the way we have been doing them for 50 years is “digging a lake with a spoon”. “It takes more time and more effort, it’s tough. »
With the three discussion forums, “It’s like I bought a spine to do the same thing. We will make faster progress for the benefit of everyone, the employees and the population,” she pleads.
In addition to the traditional negotiation tables, the President of the Conseil du trésor has set up three discussion forums on topics considered to be priorities in education and health – “class team”, “care team” and “mental health team”.
The unions refuse to take part and accuse the government of wanting to override the legal framework for negotiations. They had given the same answer when Quebec had followed a similar strategy in the last negotiations.
“I could answer them like this: Well, Bill 37 does not provide for the special sessions with the Treasury Secretary. Should I refuse from now on? No, I will not put an end to this,” says Sonia LeBel, recalling talks with union leaders in the previous round of negotiations.
“Have I engaged in an illegal negotiation for agreeing to take her call? NO. I discussed”, which is what the three forums are for. She presents them as real “places of negotiation”.
It’s hard, the current legal framework. And even if I go full throttle, I can only accelerate to a limited extent.
Sonia LeBel, President of the Treasury Board
“What I’m trying to do is, in parallel, to find a way, while respecting the applicable law, to have a common discussion space for issues that are common anyway and need to lead to the same place. However, as always, the unions are divided into different sector tables to negotiate working conditions.
“The negotiating universe in Quebec consists of 50 negotiating tables. This forces the treasury board to go back and forth between the tables a lot,” regrets Sonia LeBel.
A “conversation”
She gives a concrete example. The government is proposing to hire 15,000 “class assistants” to help teachers – the network has 25,000 classes. It could be educators from school kindergartens whose timetables are currently canceled.
The tasks of the class assistants are determined by the parties. Monitor students during an exam? give dictation? The unions representing the teachers, CSQ and FAE, might have different opinions on the issue at each of their tables, explains Sonia LeBel. And the educators’ representatives could only agree to certain tasks recommended by the CSQ and disagree to one proposed by the FAE.
“I can’t have this conversation with a union,” at the same time “it’s a conversation that’s normal, from where the forum talks about it,” pleads the elected official.
However, it does not make participation in forums a mandatory requirement for negotiating new employment contracts. She assures that the government “respects the negotiating tables”. “You work, there are appointments,” she said, while the unions lamented a sparse meeting schedule.
In a message published on Facebook on Saturday, Prime Minister François Legault accused unions of showing “closure” by avoiding the three forums, an outing that angered them.
The collective agreements of the 600,000 civil servants expire on March 31st.