Province to hire crisis management expert

Opposition pressures Lessard, Coiteux to shoulder responsibility for Highway 13

With Premier Philippe Couillard defending his two embattled ministers, the government has announced plans to bring in an expert in crisis management to ensure last week’s snowstorm foulup on Highway 13 doesn’t happen again.

But the opposition kept up its attacks, noting that under the rules of Parliament a minister is responsible for the work — good and bad — of his or her underlings and when they mess up it’s the minister who takes the heat and even resigns.

As the political fallout from the snowstorm that stranded 300 overnight continued into a second week, Public Security Minister Martin Coiteux and Transport Minister Laurent Lessard felt the need to go before the media to defend themselves from accusations of bungling the storm.

“We were as shocked as anybody else the morning after when we realized we couldn’t get that critical information at the right time,” Coiteux told reporters. “Because we asked those questions, because we challenged our people, we’re going to make those changes we need for the future.”

Coiteux refuted the opposition’s line that they should have know what was happening even without word from their bureaucrats because the jam on Highway 13 was all over the news.

Coiteux said as late as the 10 p.m. newscast, there was not a peep about Highway 13 on the television news.

“So there is a limit to think we should know things which nobody transmitted to us,” he said. “Are we happy about this? No we are not happy with this. Are we taking the necessary steps so this will never happen again? We are.”

Lessard, the minister who has taken the most heat for what Couillard calls a “foul-up,” announced he’s hired a crisis-management specialist, Michel Doré, to produce a report on what happened and how to put better practices in place. That report will be on top of another probe into the overall mess being produced by a former deputy minister of transport, Florent Gagné.

Lessard and Coiteux have argued all along they were kept in the dark about the calamity happening in the snowstorm on Highway 13 last week.

On Tuesday, Coiteux’s office released two status reports produced by the Centre des opérations gouvernmentales, an agency set up in 2006 after the Saguenay flooding disaster to co-ordinate disasters, showing neither the Ministry of Transport nor the Public Security Ministry had a handle on the situation.

One document shows the centre informed the minister at 6 p.m. Tuesday evening that there had been a road accident in St-Zotique, near the Ontario border. It mentions no other particular incidents.

In a second update, Wednesday at 7:15 a.m., the centre refers to a jam on Highway 13 but says there were 30 cars stuck on the road, not 300, and it did not call for reinforcements when the situation eroded.

But Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault blasted the government, saying it was impossible for Coiteux to know nothing because all the radio and television broadcasts Tuesday night talked about the highway. “It’s as if they want to wash their hands of the problem, and put the blame on the bureaucrats,” Legault said.

“What we are seeing clearly is that neither one nor the other had been informed of the situation or the magnitude,” Couillard countered. “I don’t think either of them failed to execute their responsibilities.”