Opposition calls Quebec health-care Bill 15 'unethical'

Quebec Solidaire (QS) critic Vincent Marissal said Health Minister Christian Dubé is looking for a political legacy, but that his Bill 15 is "unethical."

In a press scrum at the QS convention in Gatineau, Marissal suspected Dubé of being in a hurry to pass his major health reform before leaving politics.

He anticipates that the minister will force Bill 15 through a gag order between now and Dec. 8 and that he will make the opposition parties bear the brunt of it.

But the opposition will refuse to "take the blame," said Marissal.

"He's building the plane in mid-flight with boat parts and he doesn't know where he's going," he said. "He is shopping around for a legacy with Santé Québec, (...) but should we rush through a flawed bill to please a minister who wants to leave his legacy somewhere?

"The legacy is that emergency departments are overflowing, (...) women are waiting three years to have a mammogram (...) That's the real legacy of the government at the moment."

The voluminous Bill 15 would create the Santé Québec agency, which would be responsible for coordinating the network's operations. The ministry, for its part, would concentrate mainly on defining broad policy directions.

Santé Québec would become the single employer for the health and social services network, and the CISSS and CIUSSS would be integrated into it.

Because there would be a single employer, union certifications would be merged. There would also be a single seniority list, allowing staff to move from one region to another.

QS MNA Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, who is taking part in the study of Bill 15, warns that it would be risky to pass Bill 15 without having dealt with "the shovelful" of amendments tabled by the minister.

"Listen, just on Friday, at 4 p.m.-4:30 p.m. we received around 50 amendments, (...) and it's like that every day," he said. "If we rush this through with a gag order, there are going to be huge mistakes."

According to Cliche-Rivard, between 600 and 700 of the 1,200 clauses in the bill remain to be studied. Several of these clauses are concordance clauses, as Dubé pointed out earlier this week.

He said that the MNAs had already spent 180 hours in parliamentary committee.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Nov. 26, 2023.