Is Quebec's health minister making the Liberals sick?
Opposition parties focus attacks on Gaétan Barrette in their quest to defeat Couillard’s Liberals next fall
With a little more than six months to go before the next election, there's a growing sense that Quebec Health Minister Gaétan Barrette may be his party's undoing.
The radiologist entered politics as the Liberals' star candidate in 2014, after having spent eight years as the high-profile president of Quebec's medical specialists federation.
In fact, the party had wrestled him away from the Coalition Avenir Québec, for whom he'd run as a candidate in 2012.
But a lot can happen in four years. Now the CAQ, along with the other opposition parties in the National Assembly, are gleefully feasting on the health minister's poor public perception and the steady stream of negative media attention he seems to attract.
Conflict, crisis and confrontation
Barrette started drawing unfriendly fire nearly from the moment he became a candidate in 2014, when Couillard was forced to defend the $1.2-million severance package Barrette had received from the specialists federation when he quit to enter politics.
As it turned out, Barrette's weight was the bigger issue. The Journal de Montréal broke the severance package story with an unflattering photo of the corpulent candidate on its front page. The headline was "gras dur," which can be loosely translated as "fat cat."
That phrase launched an already simmering debate over whether an obese person should be named minister of health.
Barrette lost a lot of weight in the months after his election, but his controversial health reforms took up greater space as his size declined. Health-care spending barely inched forward in the Liberals' drive to reach and maintain a balanced budget in their early years in power.
Barrette's reforms played a key part of that plan. His initiative to scrap local hospital boards and consolidate their administration into vast, regional health and social service agencies was supposed to save the province $55 million in its first year — a projection that has never been independently assessed.
The changes stoked criticism of Barrette, as health care workers complained of merciless budget constraints and confusion within the system.
Barrette's next radical reforms were rolled into Bill 20, which — among other measures — included a plan to coerce doctors into seeing more patients, or face penalties if they did not.
The tabling of that legislation led to Barrette's first major confrontation as health minister: thousands of doctors met to denounce it. Medical students marched in the streets of Quebec City wearing lab coats and stethoscopes. An administrator with the general practitioners federation called him a "dictator."
Even before that conflict was resolved, a fight erupted with Jacques Turgeon, the head of Montreal's French-language superhospital, the CHUM, in early 2015.
The executive director, along with several board members, resigned, accusing Barrette of interference and abuse of power. Turgeon returned to his job a few days later, but only after the premier stepped in.
There were a stream of smaller flare-ups.
After La Presse reported on a stressed-out medical resident's suicide, Barrette said, in his opinion, hospitals were "a lot more accommodating today" of residents.
He dismissed calls for more baths for those living in provincially funded nursing homes after a man with multiple sclerosis tried to raise money through crowdfunding so that he could get a shower three times a week.
Barrette threw caustic barbs at the Parti Québécois's health critic, Diane Lamarre, calling her ignorant and claiming she had been in a conflict of interest while working as the head of the Quebec order of pharmacists. He later apologized.
The outpouring of criticism over Barrette rose to a peak late this winter.
A tearful nurse took to Facebook to describe her level of exhaustion and concern for her patients. The post drew a public uproar just as news exploded over a renegotiated deal that gave medical specialists monster pay raises.
The minister is also now under investigation from the National Assembly's ethics commissioner, after Radio-Canada's Enquête reported a plan to consolidate pediatric services on Montreal's South Shore may have been deliberately delayed for electoral reasons.
A series of polls taken in the last few months show that a substantial majority of Quebecers feel the health care system is in a sorry state or has gotten worse under the Couillard Liberals.
One notable Ipsos poll published in La Presse last month reported that 61 per cent of respondents find Barrette intransigent and arrogant.
Opposition sinks its teeth in
Sensing weakness, opposition parties have been especially quick in recent months to latch on and amplify matters involving the health care system, in general, and the health minister, in particular.
They have been pinning Quebec's unpopular deal with medical specialists to Barrette, even though it was, in fact, Treasury Board President Pierre Arcand who spearheaded the most recent deal. Still, Arcand has not faced the same kind of backlash that Barrette has.
On top of this, the money the specialists are getting was promised to the doctors more than a decade ago, when premier Philippe Couillard was health minister, sitting across the negotiating table from Barrette, who was head of the specialists federation at that time.
This week, the opposition has seized on a study that found that the number of days doctors work and their productivity have dropped over a ten-year period, despite the generous salary hikes.
The Parti Québécois's health critic, Diane Lamarre, called the report "devastating" and said the Liberals seem to have no problem with the fact that doctors are seeing fewer patients, even though Lamarre must be aware that Barrette had highlighted this very problem when he introduced Bill 20.
After all, she was the PQ's health critic at the time.
In the same vein, Québec Solidaire has recently posted a petition and organized a march calling for the health minister to resign. The party first demanded Barrette's resignation more than a year ago, but it's finding now to be an opportune time to pounce on his unpopularity.
On top of this, the CAQ has taken to calling the ruling Liberals the "Couillard-Barrette" duo, with CAQ Leader François Legault suggesting it's Barrette, in fact, who is running the show.
An encroaching election has boosted a perceived dislike of Barrette that, legitimate or not, already had been finding some momentum.
The opposition is trying to paint all the Liberals with the same brush, by repeatedly connecting Barrette to the government as a whole.
The uproar against him, though, is taking place many months before the fall election campaign, and the public may tire of the subject over the summer.
On the other hand, the opposition's strategy just might work.
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