This past week, Quebec’s health ministry announced that they would be switching from . . .
daily COVID-19 updates to weekly ones, a bewildering decision since the province has been the most heavily hit in Canada, with more than 55,000 total confirmed cases and close to 5,500 deaths.
The decision was made public Wednesday, on Quebec’s Fête nationale, which is incredibly convenient timing if, say, certain public servants were hoping to avoid scrutiny. After significant backlash from the media and the general public, freshly minted Health Minister Christian Dubé (who only replaced Danielle McCann on Monday) relented and agreed to go back to the regularly scheduled programming on Friday, June 26.
The province isn’t the only governmental body that’s been having a hard time communicating with the populace that they serve. Last week, MRC Pontiac finally released a partial membership list for their committees, around nine months after a member of the council of mayors, Serge Newberry of L’Ile du Grand Calumet, publicly requested such a measure for transparency’s sake.
The list only included the elected officials that sit on the committees, not the citizens that make up a large proportion of the seats in these decision-making bodies.
MRC Director General Bernard Roy stated that they had consulted with their legal council, who had advised them to only release the names of these committee members after receiving their expressed consent. You would think that anyone who signed up to serve the public on a committee would be fine with their name on the MRC website for all to see, but hey, a little courtesy never hurt anyone. Oh, and the requests for permission only went out after the most recent MRC meeting, even though this item has been on the agenda for months.
Judging by the way officials have dragged their feet on this file so far, we should be thankful to have a complete list by the end of the year.
That leads into another question, which is why the MRC only included committees that had been created by resolution. Impromptu committees, like the one the MRC has meeting weekly to study waste management in the territory, didn’t make the cut. It is also not stated how often these groups meet every year.
In addition, there were some odd inclusions, like the CAI committee, which was set up to monitor the work of a consulting company that the MRC no longer does business with. Perhaps there needs to be an official resolution by the council before committees that are no longer meeting get scrapped from the list.
(By the way, those consultants were given nearly $50,000 to bring investors to the region, what do we have to show for it?)
Furthermore, this list is solely MRC committees and doesn’t even come close to encompassing the non-profit boards and external committees that our public officials sit on, but that’s a complaint for another day. If it takes this much effort to disclose the names of a handful of public committee members, including ones that have been discussed in public meetings already, as in the case of the FRR analysis committee, then what hope is there for anything approaching transparent governance?
This isn’t difficult stuff, just let the public know who’s making decisions and spending tax dollars. This thing we call democracy can only function when people in positions of power are open to scrutiny from the public.
Caleb Nickerson
