Letter to the editor

A7

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Speak Up

The Progressive Conservative opposition will be watching closely as Health Minister Michael Murphy's new health care plan takes effect in the coming months. Murphy's plan came into effect Monday as the former government's plan expired.

What New Brunswickers witnessed early this week was the end of elected health boards and local decision making. We will be watching closely as the minister's reforms begin to roll out.

During the previous government's time in power more than half of the members of the province's eight Regional Health Authorities (RHA) were elected volunteers. During the last legislative session I spent more than 30 hours filibustering against the minister's reforms saying that they were not respecting the linguistic rights of many Francophones in the province. In addition, former Supreme Court Justice and minority language expert Michel Bastarache announced that he will help lead the charge against Murphy's reforms.

The opposition critic for health, Claude Landry, also believes that these reforms will hurt the democratic process even further and that many communities will suffer when they are implemented.

Landry says our party always supported empowering communities and people and did so by creating regional health authorities with elected people. The same thing was done with district education councils. The Liberal decision to remove New Brunswickers from the process in health is another attack on democracy.

We are also concerned over the fact that many of the new appointments were closely tied to the Liberal party.

These appointments should be about improving health care for patients and not about giving paid jobs to Liberal friends.

Jennot Volpe

Leader of the Official Opposition