July 22, 1999
Web posted at: 9:29 p.m. EDT (0129 GMT)

MONTREAL (Reuters) -- Quebec's nurses stubbornly refused to leave their illegal picket lines on Thursday after rejecting another contract offer, a decision that will likely heighten the crisis in the province's health-care system.

Saying they have lost faith in the government, the nurses voted 75 percent on Wednesday in favor of rejecting a contract offer on wages that their union executive had recommended. The vote was a stinging rebuke of both the government and the union leadership.

Even though they rejected the offer, nurses at some hospitals outside Montreal, the largest city in this mainly French-speaking province of 7.3 million, returned to work on Thursday.

But officials at the union, the Quebec Federation of Nurses, said most of their members were staying on the picket lines, prolonging the on-and-off strike that began on June 26.

Nurses had called a two-day truce on Monday and returned to work in preparation for Wednesday's vote. Venting their frustration and anger with a wage offer that fell far short of what they were asking for, some never put down their pickets.

The federation's 600 delegates plan to meet on Friday to decide their next step.

"Do we finally end the strike? That is what will be decided tomorrow, among other things," union spokeswoman Louise Rochefort told Reuters.

Continuing the strike would mean ignoring a provincial law requiring workers such as nurses, police officers and firefighters, who provide essential services, to remain on the job. Striking nurses have already incurred fines of two hours' pay for every hour off the job.

The nurses could decide on Friday to offer mass resignations or postpone negotiations until this autumn, when the government will be locked in contract talks with its teachers and other public service employees.

Hospital administrators are trying to cope with $1.32 billion in public health-care cutbacks over the last few years. They are bracing for a deepening backlog in elective surgeries such as cataract operations and tissue biopsies.

"The waiting lists for surgeries will lengthen considerably," said Michel Gauthier, spokesman for the Sacre Coeur hospital, Montreal.

Chantal Beauregard, spokeswoman for the McGill University Health Center -- which has more than 3,000 nurses at the Montreal General Hospital, Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal Neurological Hospital and Montreal Children's Hospital -- said well over 1,000 elective and day surgeries had been cancelled.

"We could not do elective surgeries that would require (a patient's) overnight stay because we did not want to fill up too many beds," she said.

Despite the strike, nurses have been providing essential services. They include full staffing for emergency rooms, intensive-care areas, kidney dialysis and chemotherapy.

For nonessential services, hospitals have been coping with only about three-quarters of their usual nursing complement.

The nurses are demanding a 6 percent wage increase over two years and a 10 percent pay boost to help bring their salaries up to those of other Quebec social service workers.

Saying it could not afford to set a precedent, the government has refused to offer the nurses anything more than the 5 percent wage hike over three years it has proposed for all of Quebec's 415,000 civil servants.

Salaries for Quebec nurses range from about $20,000 -- the lowest starting salary among unionized nurses in Canada -- up to about $29,000. In recent years, hospitals in the U.S. states of Florida and Texas have been successful in attracting Quebec nurses to much higher paying jobs.

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