NDP leader slams province for Health P.E.I. fiasco

P.E.I. NDP Leader Joe Byrne says the Liberal government can’t seem to make up its mind about community-based governance.

Byrne is referring to the recent overhaul of the Health Services Act and the consequent resignation of the board of directors with Health P.E.I.

The NDP leader goes back as far as the early 1990s replacement of the Hospital and Health Services Commission and the Department of Health and Social Services with a “supposedly independent health services agency at the very same time as the thenLiberal government collapsed the system of district school boards’’.

Byrne noted that this sort of contradictory impulse has repeatedly resurfaced, recently for example, in collapsing the English Language School Board into a pseudo-independent Public Schools Branch of the Department of Education with three directors, one of whom is the deputy minister.

He said it was only last year that government appointed an external, community-based body to carry the load of determining school closures “and then threw Pat Mella and the other commissioners under the bus’’.

“It’s been typical. They set up a community body so as to offload unpopular decisions from a minister, then claw back the decisionmaking when they’re seen not to have control,’’ Byrne said.

The NDP leader accuses government of doing another flipflop with Health P.E.I., with an apparently arbitrary rejigging of the legislation.

He said the power to run things is being reclaimed for the minister.