A Coalition Avenir Québec government would expand private health care in the province, Christine Fréchette said Monday, announcing she would allow doctors to work simultaneously in both the public and for-profit sectors.
Speaking in the Laurentian town of St-Colomban, the CAQ leader said she would reverse a policy brought in under her own party that restricts doctors from operating a private clinic while working in the public system. Introduced by former health minister Christian Dubé, the rule aims to keep doctors in public practice.
“I believe deeply in our public system,” Fréchette said. But “we think it will benefit Quebecers to allow this type of presence” in both private and public medicine.
Quebec has more private-sector doctors than all other provinces combined.
The change would come with guardrails to ensure doctors spend a minimum amount of time working in public health care, Fréchette said.
The CAQ’s opponents were quick to accuse Fréchette of a flip-flop.
“It’s improvisation and it’s above all a contradiction of what the CAQ itself did under Christian Dubé,” Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said at a campaign stop in Sherbrooke, telling reporters the PQ would keep the current policy in place.
“Once again, Ms. Fréchette is throwing another of her former colleagues under the campaign bus,” Quebec Liberal Leader Charles Milliard said.
“The first to get a taste was François Legault. The second was Pierre Fitzgibbon,” he said, referencing the former economy minister who presided over Quebec’s fraught investments in battery plant startups.
“This morning it’s Christian Dubé,” Milliard said.
“Yes, the private system has a role to play” in health care, Milliard said. “But I didn’t come into politics to abdicate on the quality of the public system.”
Still on the theme of private health-care expansion, Fréchette also said she would expand the scenarios in which the government funds private-sector services.
“We’re going to increase the use of the private sector to reduce wait times,” she said.
Under the CAQ’s plan, the province would pick up the bill at private clinics for patients who waited more than nine months to receive a surgery in a public clinic or hospital. Santé Québec has already started rolling out a program to fund private-sector surgeries, but it currently imposes a 12-month wait time before patients can turn to private care.
Fréchette also said the province would pay for an additional 100,000 private-sector imaging exams.
Along with plans for private medicine, Fréchette said she would expand the services nurses and paramedics can provide and train more medical students in the regions.
Fréchette faced a series of questions about Santé Québec, the CAQ-created agency tasked with managing Quebec’s sprawling health-care network. Le Journal de Montréal reported Monday that the agency had spent more than $465 million on IT contracts since 2023.
“I’m angry to see that there were cost overruns. I also want to see that it stops,” Fréchette said, telling reporters that new contract rules should reduce overruns in the future.
St-Pierre Plamondon said Fréchette was dodging accountability, comparing the report to the $1.1-billion SAAQclic scandal.
“It’s the same people, the same behaviour … the same situation where we waste hundreds of millions and nobody is responsible,” he said.
The Parti Québécois, which was in first place in a poll released Monday, has promised to scrap Santé Québec, with St-Pierre Plamondon arguing that abolishing the “bureaucratic monster” would free up at least $40 million to invest in public services.
St-Pierre Plamondon returned to the topic Monday in an announcement that took aim at the broader civil service. The PQ leader accused the CAQ of “losing control of the bureaucracy” by adding thousands of administrative positions.
Sonia Bélanger, the CAQ health minister and candidate for Prévost, defended Santé Québec but told reporters in St-Colomban that she has “specific expectations for Santé Québec regarding the reduction of administrative jobs.”
Fréchette said she wasn’t interested in “debating structure,” arguing that Santé Québec is saving money and reducing wait times.
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