QUEBEC CITY -- Quebec Liberal leader Dominique Anglade pointed to an exchange of emails published Wednesday in the media to once again call for a public inquiry into the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Wednesday, Quebecor media published an email exchange between Premier Francois Legault, Health Minister Christian Dube and the director of public health, Horacio Arruda, among others.
These key players seemed completely unaware of the outbreaks of COVID-19 in Montreal bars last July, even after Montreal public health sounded the alarm.
But all indications are that the situation will never be investigated by the health commissioner charged with reviewing the network's performance in the first wave, the Liberals said Wednesday.
Government communications, including within the crisis unit, are not part of the announced investigations, Anglade lamented during question period in the Salon Bleu.
Neither the health commissioner nor the coroner will be able to investigate this aspect, "however, this aspect is important... to learn collectively from this crisis," she insisted.
According to Anglade, the emails published in the newspaper add a "new argument" that justifies the holding of an independent public inquiry into the overall management of the crisis.
"If there is no public inquiry, we will never know whether the contracts awarded during the crisis were justified, whether inter-ministerial coordination was effective. We will never know if the vaccination campaign was optimized, if the confinement could have been organized differently, if the rapid tests were used in the right way," she said.
Liberal health critic Marie Montpetit added that the emails demonstrate the "significant gap between the government and the management of the pandemic on the ground."
They highlight the fact that there was no clear chain of communication, and that decision-makers learned important information from newspapers, she said.
-- this report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2021.
