Health Minister Christian Dubé’s comments about nurses’ unions and their reservations about certain premiums were received as "2,000 per cent contempt," said Claire Montour, who was president of the CSQ-affiliated Fédération de la santé at the time.

Montour testified at the hearings of the Administrative Labour Tribunal Friday concerning complaints brought against Quebec by various unions because of Ministerial Order 071. The order provided various measures to bring nurses back into the public network on a full-time basis, including $15,000-bonuses.

The root of the problem is that these bonuses were never negotiated with the unions, which are the bargaining agents for their members’ working conditions. They were announced at a press conference by Quebec, and then the details were set out in a ministerial order.

Unions representing nurses were all the more outraged because they had spent the previous months negotiating their collective agreements, trying to obtain clauses and premiums to attract and retain nurses.

They had been told by the government negotiators that there was no more money, said the witnesses from unions the FIQ, the CSN and the FSQ.

Yet, in the weeks that followed, Minister Dubé announced at a press conference that he was prepared to put $1 billion into various measures to attract full-time nurses to the public network.

And when the nurses’ unions criticized some of the conditions attached to these bonuses, Dubé criticized them for telling their members not to sign anything, rather than assisting with recruitment efforts.

The minister also said the unions were primarily seeking to obtain these bonuses for their representatives who were on leave, while Quebec wanted to reserve them for nurses in the field.

"I received it as contempt at 2,000 per cent," said Montour, addressing administrative judge Myriam Bedard.

In the hours and days that followed, the union representatives had received criticism from some of their members, who were called upon to vote on their tentative agreement, with them asking why had they failed to get the extra $1 billion through contract negotiations and why did they believe the government’s claim that there was no money left. 

The Quebec government will hear from witnesses in April.