Francophone group asks court to overturn firing of health authority board

A francophone health care lobby group is going to court hoping to quash the Higgs government's firing of the Vitalit health authority board last month.

galit sant en franais is seeking a quick hearing in the Court of Queen's Bench for a judicial review of the decision.

They want to persuade a judge to order the reinstatement of the board, which had eight elected members and seven appointed by the province.

Lawyer Ronald Caza saidthe July 15 replacement of the board violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the rights of New Brunswick's English and French communities to their own "distinct educational and cultural institutions."

"If the community doesn't take this to court, it's the beginning of the end," Caza said at a news conference.

"It's literally the beginning of the end. The government will take it as a message that they don't have to respect their constitutional obligations. They aretaking away an existing right to management by a linguistic minority. Imagine what they'll do with their other obligations."

Whether the Charter's guarantee of "distinct educational and cultural institutions" includes health care has never been fully tested in court.

But Caza argues that the creation of two elected health authority boards in 2008 along linguistic lines extended those rights to health care and that can't be taken away now.

The court filing also invokes Section 23 of the Charter, which guarantees minority-language educational institutions and has been interpreted to require a level of community governance.

The Health Department said it would not comment on a case before the courts, but late Friday,Premier BlaineHiggs released a statement calling the court action "disappointing at a time when we face genuine healthcare challenges throughout our province and all of Canada."

"Our goal is to ensure our two health networks complement each other in their delivery of the best care possible to our residents while also respecting all official language rights."

Before the court challenge announcement, Health Minister Bruce Fitch defended the firing of the Horizon and Vitalit health authority boards, saying it will allow a more "direct line of contact" between different parts of the health care system.

Higgs replaced both health boards with elected trustees at the same time as he fired Horizon CEO Dr. John Dornan and named Fitch to replace Dorothy Shephard as health minister.

Fitch said the move was intended in part as a signal of the government's seriousness to address worsening emergency department wait times and other chronic problems in the system.

"That gets the attention of everybody that we mean business," he said on CBC's Information Morning in the Summer.

Higgs said in July the replacement of the two boards with trustees was temporary, but last week he referred to it as "a change to the governance model."

The minister said "legislative changes" are coming in the fall but wouldn't say whether that will permanently eliminate elected boards.

"I don't want to get ahead of it," he said.

"People always jump to a conclusion that may not be there. That's the danger of talking too far ahead of making a decision."

galit sant en franais says eliminating elected boards won't fix anything in the system and will only make things worse by further distancing management from the communities they serve.

"We believe in management that is closer to the public," said the group's president Dr. Hubert Dupuis.

Besides Dupuis and other members of the organization, two members of the fired Vitalit board, Dr. Louis-Marie Simard and Norma McGraw, are also part of the court application.

galit sant en franais is already suing the province in an attempt to make the health authority more independent from the government by having its entire board and its CEO elected.

That lawsuit will continue separately from the case announced Friday.

Dupuis accused the government of stalling that lawsuit by recently hiring an outside law firm to handle the case.

He said Higgs's ultimate goal is a single health authority for the entire province, though Higgs promised earlier this year that he would not merge Horizon and Vitalit.