What if we trusted the experts? | 3rd Annexure

Even if the Legault government’s highway plan between Lévis and Quebec includes some dedicated lanes for public transit, the plan will lead to additional greenhouse gas emissions, something Bernard Trinville thinks he asked us to leave him alone during the last election campaign. The issue of GHG In the third link.

However, it has been proven by urban planning and transportation experts that adding road segments increases the use of the automobile, not the other way around.

Now we talk about the third link which focuses only on public transport. It is a tram, a metro, a REM Or buses, said François Legault this week. The cost of the project is unknown, the route, place of departure and arrival, in short everything has to be done and put in shape. The relevance of this exclusive link to public transport is once again unproven.

Representatives of Chaudière-Appalaches can demand consolation prizes for their constituencies – a compensatory plan or a commitment to implement a plan in 2026 – but the prime minister does not want to imprison himself in any obligation other than creating a new plan. My intention is to do it as soon as possibleThe Prime Minister was content to address the National Assembly on Wednesday afternoon.

Hasty plans without real planning

The collapse of the third annexation project is symptomatic of an increasingly common practice in Quebec City: political leaders launch projects on the fly for reasons that appear to be electioneering, and make decisions without all the data and necessary studies. Let the experts do their job.

Moreover, since coming to power in 2018, it is clear that the Legault government has multiplied these types of ill-conceived and poorly planned initiatives. The 4-year-old kindergarten program, given the existence of the early childhood center model in Quebec for two decades, did not produce the expected results.

Education Minister Bernard Trinville was forced to announce last February that the Legault government would not meet its target of opening 2,600 4-year-old kindergarten classes by 2025-2026 as planned. This target has been postponed to 2030. Yet it was one of Francois Legault’s key promises during the 2018 election campaign.

The same is true for old age homes. The Montreal Journal On April 24, the delivery of 30 new homes was postponed, and 6 homes delivered by the Société Québécois des Infrastructures in 2022 were either empty or less populated than expected. Although labor shortage problems are difficult to predict, it is certainly possible to better estimate needs and occupations, and especially costs.

Quoted by André-Pierre Contandriopoulos, professor of health administration at the University of Montreal’s School of Public Health. Montreal JournalNursing homes cost more than home care, while thousands of people are currently waiting for services.

Due to ill-prepared notices, it was forced to amend its law to impose a 3% cap on inflation-linked electricity pricing.

Of course, in 2019, when the new law is passed, it is impossible to predict the pandemic, the crisis of supply chains and the war in Ukraine, or the inflation rate to come in 40 years. We could not predict that.

But the government should have been more cautious and prudent about movements that could affect inflation. Sylvain Gautreault, a member of the National Assembly in October 2019, then recalled a fundamental fact about the evolution of inflation, which should have been considered by the government.

On October 2, 2019, during the debate on Bill 34 on electricity supply rates, Sylvain Gautreault said: I challenge you, anybody here, to guess, to guess, to tell us what the inflation rate will be in two years, three years, five years. We can have forecasts, economists can do that, they can anticipate, but many events can happen, such as the rate of inflation varies, for example, depending on the trend of oil, socio-economic, socio-political events, as we have seen recently in the oil-producing countries in the Middle East, Happened, for example, after the events of September 11, climatic events, hurricanes, typhoons, natural disasters or political situations. This affects the trend of inflation.

What if we trusted the experts?

Philippe Couillard’s previous government had the dubious idea of ​​entrusting the development of public transit projects to the Caisse de depot et placement du Québec. REM, despite all its flaws, is functional. And East’s operation was suspended, abandoned by the Fund, because of fundamental problems in its implementation.

Why hand over urban planning to a case deputation that looks for the most profitable project and the best for the public good?

Back to the third link. The project was launched to meet the expectations of the voters of Chaudière-Apalaches, without urban planning and without substantive studies. It was canceled by the Prime Minister on April 5 after receiving new information, based on teleworking in 2022 and travel on existing bridges in the Capital-National region over the past year.

And, once again, the new plan was announced based on basic data, not in-depth studies and quantitative assessments. Do we really need a third link based on public transport? The question remains open, but, in the meantime, the government is going ahead with another promise.

Shouldn’t the government go back to the basics of relying on the skills of consultants, engineers, architects, town planners, planners in transport ministries, and skilled workers in transport agencies?

Isn’t it time to put the development of our territory, our transport axes, our choices in public transport in the hands of experts?