PQ plan seeks to distance politicians from contracts
IN A BID TO FIGHT CORRUPTION, the Parti Québécois wants to create an independent agency responsible for awarding Transport Quebec contracts. The plan would remove politicians from the contract awarding process and transfer 5,000 employees out of the minis
QUEBEC — Arguing that the way to fight corruption is to remove politicians from the mix, Transport Minister Sylvain Gaudreault has announced plans to create an independent agency to run future provincial road-construction projects.
But the agency may never get off the ground with one opposition party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, saying it will oppose the Parti Québécois minority government’s scheme.
The Liberals, however, say they are not opposed to the new agency “in principle,” but party leader Philippe Couillard said they want guarantees there will be some kind of political accountability in the way lucrative road contracts get handed out by the new arm’s-length agency.
Packaged as the latest tool in the government’s war on corruption, Gaudreault rose in the legislature Wednesday to table Bill 68, an act to create the Agence des infrastructures de transport du Québec.
If the bill were adopted, the new agency would be up and running by April 2015.
Besides promising the new agency will be a cost-cutter, Gaudreault called it a strong “pro-integrity” move by taking the decision-making process out of the hands of politicians and breaking with what he tagged the “Liberal years.” He did not elaborate. But he said Quebec wants to block corruption and collusion any way it can and the new agency will be a “powerful barrier” to the scourge that has rocked the province and its institutions for several years.
The task is enormous. Quebec plans to spend $5.6 billion over the next two years on roads and infrastructure. A total of 6,500 people work for the Transport Department.
If passed, the immediate impact would be to reduce the ministry — which currently handles that huge pile of money — to a mere shell, with 90 per cent of employees, 5,850 people, transferring to the agency.
It would manage and operate all road infrastructures under Quebec’s authority, starting with the tender and bidding process and ending with the traditional ribbon cutting.
The department would be reduced to a “big picture” role, handling long-term-vision projects such as improving public transit or the transport of goods.
Best of all for hawks who see the Quebec bureaucracy as inefficient and clogged in red tape, the new agency would not be subject to the restrictive rules of the powerful Quebec public sector and its unions.
That means it will have more flexibility to hire and, for example, will be able to offer much higher salaries to the engineers it hires than the Transport Department can now.
One of the factors in the rise of corruption raised at the Charbonneau Commission has been the fact the best and brightest engineers had been wooed out of the public sector by high-paying private engineering firms, allowing bad apples to rise to the top.
The new agency, Gaudreault argued, will be above the fray, administered by an independent board of directors made up of nine to 13 persons.
Board members would be selected based on their experience and skills in the milieu, not as political favours, Gaudreault said. The president of the board will report to the ministry, will have to produce performance reports and be governed by a code of ethics.
Gaudreault, however, found himself defending the clout of such administrative boards given recent failures at Tourism Quebec and the CHUM, where board members were apparently largely in the dark of what was going on upstairs. He said Quebec hopes it can avoid repeating such errors. And he argued the agency responds to an idea floated by one of the province’s top corruption snipers, former Montreal police chief-turned CAQ MNA Jacques Duchesneau, who tabled his own anti-corruption report in 2011.
Later, Duchesneau said Gaudreault is talking through his hat. The CAQ announced plans to oppose the bill at first reading and said the solution to corruption and collusion is not to create yet another agency.
“(The agency) is a way for government to stay away from making important decisions,” Duchesneau said. “We are pushing to get more expertise within the department, not the creation of a new agency.
“How the hell can he think that it’s going to be cheaper when we are paying people more? The problem is not there. It’s a management and governance problem within the department — period.”
But the biggest blast against the agency came from unions representing some of those 5,000 employees.
The Syndicat des professionelles et professionals du gouvernement du Québec (SPGQ), accused the government of creating a new nonunionized “kingdom within a kingdom,” which will lead to two classes of employees.
SPGQ president Richard Perron said the reason the public service was set up in the first place was to protect employees from undue political influence. The new agency should be kept within the purview of the public sector, he said.
He noted not a single Quebec ministry employee has been hauled before the Charbonneau Commission.