Sonia Bélanger, junior health minister and the minister responsible for seniors and social services, is expected to be sworn in as early as Friday as Quebec’s new health minister, according to sources at Radio-Canada.
This comes after Christian Dubé announced he would be stepping down from his role as health minister Thursday afternoon.
Bélanger, a trained professional nurse, first became a Member of the National Assembly for the riding of Prévost in the Laurentians in 2022.
Before entering politics, she served as CEO for the regional health board known as the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Ãle-de-Montréal and as executive director of the CSSS du Sud-Ouest-Verdun, a health service centre.
In a post on social media, Dubé cited difficult negotiations with unions representing doctors as a key reason for his decision to step down. He will sit as an Independent MNA until the end of his current mandate.
In the post, Dubé said he was leaving the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) party and signalled that he was upset with the way the government had backed off on many of its planned health-care reforms in Bill 2.
The legislation seeks to overhaul how doctors are remunerated, which prompted backlash in the health community with hundreds of doctors looking to practice in other provinces and others saying they would retire early.
Premier François Legault stepped in after negotiations had broken off between Quebecâs family doctors and Dubé, along with Treasury Board President France-Ãlaine Duranceau with an agreement in principle reached last week.
Quebecâs family doctors are set to announce the result of their vote on the agreement Friday.
Part of the proposed deal includes removing penalties against doctors tied to their collective performance targets. It also eliminates a controversial plan to assign patients on a colour-coded system based on their level of vulnerability, and removes all articles in the legislation that would have penalized doctors for not following the rules of the reform.
The implementation of Bill 2 has been delayed until the end of February to give the CAQ government time to amend the legislation â a task that would now fall to the new health minister to oversee.
