Results of Quebec Elections
Great Battles Await Us
The first observation I draw from the October 3 election is that democracy is currently sick in Quebec. For example, the Liberal Party received fewer votes from the population than the Parti Québécois, but it is still the party that forms the official opposition. As for the Conservative Party of Quebec, which is not a party that I like very much, it got almost as many votes as the Liberal Party and yet it has no seats. Its leader will not even have the right to speak in the National Assembly. The people who voted for him will feel very frustrated that they can't even hear him ask questions. It is an infringement of democracy.
In 2018, the CAQ [Coalition Avenir Québec] proposed a revision of the voting method, but when they were elected they said that it was no longer a priority, that the voters had other things on their minds. The democracy we currently have, with the current voting system, is in fact an obstacle to democracy. This voting system has to be reviewed.
On the economic side, with the CAQ and the changes they have made, I fear that with their large majority of seats, the friends of the party who contributed to their election campaigns will be rewarded. Take the question of the privatization of the health care system. We see the government's openness to move more and more towards the private sector, instead of meeting the demands of workers who work in the public service. In hospitals this is what happens. In education it is the same thing.
The public system is sick and there is no one in the CAQ government who is going to find solutions for the problems because their perspective is always to go more towards the private sector. The government is trying to get us to accept this by saying, for example, that Quebeckers won't have to pay anything in private hospitals, that they'll be able to use their health insurance card. In fact, if we let this pass, before long, it's not the health insurance card that we're going to be using to pay, it's a credit card.
I saw how it is in the United States when I went to Pittsburgh for my work with the Steelworkers. Workers have told me that we must continue to fight in Quebec and in Canada for a universal public health care system, not to leave it to the private sector, because in the United States there are more than 22 million people who have no medical insurance. One of the main causes of personal bankruptcies in the United States is the health care system, the fact that people do not have insurance or are struggling to pay private insurance.
Another area of great concern is
the major setback in the new Occupational Health and Safety
Act which was passed in 2021 which is coming into force
in stages. One of the law's main measures is to force injured or
sick workers to return to work before their situation is
stabilized. This means that if the agent of the CNESST
(Commission des normes, de l'équité, de la santé et de la
sécurité du travail) decides that a worker should have recovered
in say four weeks, then after four weeks the worker must
return to work even if their treating physician says they are
not ready to return, not recovered. It is estimated that the
changes that have been made to the law will save employers more
than $3 billion.
What will also hurt a lot is that it is now the company that will decide who is the doctor in charge of the health program in the workplace. Before this recent change in the law, the doctor was chosen by the health and safety committee of the establishment. We had done a lot of work on this in the past to replace doctors, who used to be appointed by the company to manage health programs, with doctors from CLSCs (local community service centres) over whom employers have no influence. They were not accountable to the employer for the workplace health program. This power of the health and safety committee was enshrined in the law, but the upcoming changes remove that power from the health and safety committee. From now on, as well, prevention programs will be at the discretion of the employer. This will have a direct impact on the prevention of workplace accidents.
In the mining sector, we had greatly reduced workplace accidents. We had a legally recognized means to intervene.
These are battles that we must now fight again.
André Racicot is a retired mining worker from the Abitibi region.
(Translated from the original French by TML)
This article was published in
Volume 52 Number 45 - November 14, 2022
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmld2022/Articles/D520451.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca