Joel Ceausu – The Suburban LJI Reporter

If you haven’t heard about Bill 15, take a closer look, because if you currently or will someday access healthcare services in Quebec, it’s going to impact you.

Health Minister Christian Dubé’s colossal legislation contains some 1200 clauses mostly addressing governance, not delivery of healthcare, and therein lies the problem say opposition politicians and community organizations on a full court press to slow the Legault government’s adoption of this monumental reform.

Bill 15 will radically centralize and change how healthcare is delivered they told some 150 people at a town hall organized by local MNAs Jennifer Maccarone (Westmount-Saint-Louis), Michele Setlakwe (Mont Royal-Outremont) Elisabeth Prass (D’Arcy McGee) and Désirée McGraw (NDG) at Dawson College Monday night.

Today we have CIUSSS and CISSS and some institutions with various legal identities said Liberal Opposition health critic André Fortin, but Bill 15 will abolish these entities and put them all under a new agency, Santé Québec. “That means no more boards of directors for these establishments, and we will basically have one agency with one board in charge of the health network across Quebec.”

A single employer and board of directors means local volunteers and stakeholders previously serving on boards become simple verification entities for the government, to see if they conform to Santé Québec objectives. These individuals will receive money from the government “but no longer have a say in their local structures. It’s incredibly top-down. That’s the vision.”

Quebec Community Groups Network president Eva Ludvig says access to care will be jeopardized for anglophones, with communities outside Montreal the most affected. Currently, English access guarantees are managed by local access committees staffed by volunteers: If you have to go to Rimouski for surgery “you are dependent on institutions that don’t have the means or right to give you access in English. These committees help make that happen… Bill 15 does not address this. This act is centralizing under one body, under control of the bureaucracy. They know nothing about the communities.”

Dr. Abraham Fuks, former Dean of McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine says the “deep flaw in this bill is that the government understands health care to be a bureaucratic initiative and it’s not. Hospitals are not bureaucratic entities; they are social cultural entities of communities. But the government is treating it like Revenu Québec.”

Moreover, “when you look at a board meeting you look around the room and you’ll see that is the glue between the institution and the professionals that work there, between the hospital and community it serves.” This is how initiatives happen, he says, where someone recognizes a larger number of local children with autism and suggests more local programs. “That doesn’t come from Quebec City.”

When corporate memory and community engagement goes away, he says, all that will be left will be small verification councils and a local CEO doing the bidding of the super agency Santé Québec. “To hand it all to individuals with no experience on the front lines is like asking me to run the Bank of Canada.”

Maccarone noted the bill’s disastrous effect on hospital foundations. Fuks concurs. The Jewish General Hospital didn’t build the Segal Cancer Centre “because the government said we need it,” he says. It’s because the board recognized the need “and went to Alvin Segal and said this is what we need to do and it happened. Would it happen without professional fundraisers? People don’t give to a building, they give to a person… I assure you, no one is going to write a million-dollar cheque to Santé Québec wherever they are seated.”

“We’re only halfway through” said Fortin, noting he and Setlakwe studied some 600 clauses, “clause by clause,” and the government has accepted hundreds of amendments so far, which he says indicates “they know they wrote their bill in haste.” The government insists it needs to be adopted two weeks from now or it will invoke closure.

A petition has been launched demanding reconsideration of the Bill; additional consultations; amendments to preserve local governance and proximity to the community, including in the English language.

View more at https://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/ex… n