François Legault: Quebec’s man with a plan

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/CP

François Legault is a popular fellow these days. On a recent morning, the businessman and politician (he insists on being referred to in that order) bounded into the wood-panelled confines of Restaurant Bonaparte in Old Montreal, wearing a suit, a wide smile and carrying a mobile phone that wouldn’t stay quiet. Many people—journalists especially—want Legault’s ear right now, and he’s massaged his answers into a tight, quotable boilerplate.

“It’s time the PQ stops being in denial,” the former education minister says of the Parti Québécois, the sovereignist party where he spent his entire political career. “Sovereignty isn’t a probability, and many people in the party know it.” Quebec, he adds, is “mired in stagnation.” Usually, these conversations end with the same question: will he run for office on a platform that promotes putting an end to the national question that has dominated Quebec for over 40 years?

Many Quebecers are hoping he picks up the damned hammer, already. In February, Legault and businessman Charles Sirois launched Coalition pour l’Avenir du Québec (Coalition for the future of Quebec), which has been alternatively described as a “think tank,” an “apolitical and non-partisan reflection group,” and a “political movement” that is “expected to morph into a full-fledged political vehicle in time for the next Quebec election.” Legault, who prefers the term “coalition,” is the CAQ’s de facto leader and wrote much of its platform: a right-of-centre doctrine advocating more personal responsibility, less state intervention and a wholesale revamping of the way the province delivers health and education services. It mentions sovereignty only to say the movement is dépassé. According to successive polls taken over the last four months, Legault would easily waltz into the premier’s office as the head of a majority government. This, despite having no candidate slate, no party to govern and no structure to harvest hard cash from all that goodwill.

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Hey look: Turns out a bad month for the sovereignty movement is a bad month for the sovereignty movement

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

From the magazine, my column fails completely to find a silver lining for Pauline Marois.

Where was Lucien when it mattered?

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 5:54 PM - 10 Comments

It’s almost as if he’d never been in charge.

First, Lucien Bouchard breaks his years-long silence to say the PQ is hopelessly misguided—on sovereignty, on the economy, on identity. Then he says Quebec is starving its universities by capping tuition. I can’t be the only one waiting for the other shoe to drop. (Jamais deux sans trois, and all that.) But whether or not he completes the trifecta, none of it really matters. Bouchard is hardly the white knight Quebec conservatives would like him to be.

The problem with Bouchard’s criticisms isn’t that they’re hypocritical—they’re not—nor that they’re fundamentally wrong. It’s that they’re anachronistic.

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Why it's worth paying attention to the PQ's demands

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 4:24 PM - 6 Comments

It didn’t take long for federalists to jump on the glaring contradiction that forms the basis of Pauline Marois’s “Plan pour le Québec souverain“: If asking for more powers for Quebec is merely a prelude to a successful campaign for out-and-out separation, as its very title indicates, why would anyone in Ottawa accept to play along? (For the record, Marois wants Ottawa to give up control of taxation, immigration, broadcast communications, the environment, and agriculture to the province.) Chantal Hébert draws perhaps the best illustration of the absurdity of it all:

It is, in a sense, the opposite of the beau risque. Twenty-five years ago, René Lévesque invited sovereigntists to play the federalist game. Today, the PQ leader is inviting Canada to play the sovereigntist game.

In cruder terms, it’s the equivalent of having your wife ask you to pick up the tab for a date with her boyfriend (or vice versa). That may seem weird, but a lot of weird things happen in dysfunctional relationships. Desperate and confused spouses do desperate and confused things as a matter of routine—and it would be a stretch to describe the Conservatives’ or the Liberals’ relationship with Quebec without using either of those two adjectives. The fact that logic dictates Marois shouldn’t get anywhere with this hardly means she won’t. Continue…

Coalition fever: The swine flu of 2008

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 5:14 PM - 5 Comments

Just try to imagine the hand-wringing this would’ve caused across Canada: A Bloc-supported coalition in power in Ottawa with the PQ, propped up by the ADQ, in power in Quebec City.

According to a report in La Presse, it could’ve happened:

In order to stymie Jean Charest, who was clearly preparing to call an election for December 8, the ADQ made a suprising proposal to draw in the PQ. Mario Dumont and Pauline Marois would have gone to see the lieutenant-governor, Pierre Duchesne, to tell him that the parties with a majority in the National Assembly were uniting to form a coalition government, with Pauline Marois as premier.

The ADQ was apparently so desperate to avoid having to run a campaign that it was going to let a party holding less seats—recall that the ADQ was the official opposition at the time—take over the premier’s job!

Now imagine what the provincial and federal budgets would have looked like had it happened. Something tells me the fiscal imbalance would’ve been solved in no time.

At DMA, tomorrow's polls today (AKA good news for the Charest Liberals)

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, December 4, 2008 at 7:55 PM - 15 Comments

“Smells like… victory.” (CP photo)

A little birdy told me some news. It seems there is a new poll coming out tomorrow, and it looks good for Jean Charest’s Liberals come election night on December 8th. Read it first after this here break…

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Bonsoir, merci, salut la visite

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, November 17, 2008 at 4:45 PM - 0 Comments

The main story emerging from this non-story of an election in Quebec is the complete, total, utter, out-and-out, unmitigated and unqualified collapse of the Action Democratique de Québec. It has been something to behold, this slow motion car crash. Why, it was just last year that Mario Dumont&Co. took Quebec by storm, punting aside the moribund Péquistes and coming within a hair of governing the freakin’ province. Mario, Super Mario, had it all: he was a telegenic leader unburdened by gray hair (dear old Charest) or cocaine (poor, poor André). His party didn’t rest solely on the tired federalist/sovereignist axis, and it gave the province’s English an alternative to the Liberal Party of Quebec–which, the somewhat more hysterical Anglos among us have argued, has taken têtes carrés for granted.

Not to dance on anyone’s grave, particularly when the person has yet to be buried, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t reflect on the certain death of the ADQ and, come election day, the return of Quebec to its rightful status: that of a bitchy, conflicted two-party province that is constantly at war with itself. Yippee!

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The boss was (allegedly) not amused

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 10:29 PM - 1 Comment

Jacques Nadeau must have a great sense of humour. How else would the journalist, press attaché and forest fire expert (you can’t make this stuff up) get in with Prenez Garde Aux Chiens, the cheeky young things who during the federal election pilloried Justin Trudeau in an uproariously funny spoof?

Granted, his role in this little ditty is limited to a few uttered lines of joual, and the sketch itself drags on a little too long. His appearance is nonetheless funny for two reasons: 1) it makes light of Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois’ sometimes-terrible, usually-execrable English, as well as her huge bugger of a mansion/castle on Ile Bizard; and 2) Jacques Nadeau is now a candidate for the PQ, which makes Pauline Marois his boss. The video is all over the internet, and has caught the attention of PQ brass, who according to a report in Le Soleil are none too pleased with the omnipresent example of Mr. Nadeau’s insubordination. Curse you to Hades, World Wide Web!

But wait, there’s more! After allegedly issuing a letter of demand, uhh, demanding that the sketch be removed, the péquistes said there was no such alleged letter at all; rather, they say the whole thing was just a big alleged misunderstanding, and that everyone should go back to what they were allegedly doing. More fun after this alleged jump.

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Where's Mario?

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, August 25, 2008 at 11:01 AM - 0 Comments

If we’re going strictly on stereotypes, you could say that La Presse is the newspaper of the great, large, mushy middle ground between the seven librarians and half-dozen outraged separatists who read the high brow Le Devoir and the blue-collared masses who devour the Journal de Montréal along with their sandwiches de bologne and May Wests. Not all of this is true –– I actually hate baloney, and only my blood is blue –– but it’s safe to say that La Presse has forever been successful at attracting a clientele that is neither bookish sovereigntist or of the lunchbox tabloid set (or, at the very least, it is a required second read for the former, if not the latter.) It is, for good or ill, Quebec’s newspaper of record. So here’s a question for the ADQ: what happens when the newspaper of record forgets you exist?

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"I'll take 'Barrel of Monkeys' for $200, Alex."

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 2:59 PM - 0 Comments

So after putting into words what his leader has already done in practice –– that is to say, acknowledging the credibility gap between the political class and the voting public that must first be bridged before sovereignty can be properly discussed — longtime PQ MNA François Legault was dragged in from of his own caucus to explain why he would embarrass the party by telling people what they already know. “Mr. Legault explained himself and I am satisfied by what I heard,” opined Stéphane Bédard.

Well, thank heavens. What was that about credibility?

Pauline Marois declares Quebec independence…*

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, August 11, 2008 at 5:59 PM - 0 Comments

Pauline Marois (not exactly as shown) addresses the voting public.

*… from gasoline. A péquiste government, Marois declares, will ‘liberate’ (har, har) Quebec from its dependence on oil in ten years.

I’d love to say that this is a JFK-man-on-the-moon type declaration, in which a politician boldly enunciates an impossible dream, thereby igniting a nation’s imagination so that this dream may become reality. If this is the case, she chose an interesting venue indeed: Camp Edphy, a summer camp in the Laurentians where, coincidentally enough, I was once physically assaulted by a horse.

Big ideas need to be fleshed out: How will the PQ get Quebecers’ rear ends into hybrid cars? What sort of tax incentives will be offered for homeowners to switch from oil to electric heating? What in God’s name will be done with Bombardier Recreational Products, the Quebec-based manufacturer of four wheelers, Sea Doos and the like – machines for which Quebecers themselves have a voracious appetite? Don’t look to the PQ’s website for answers. The biggest news on the site right now is Marois’ outrage at how Quebec’s athletes can’t display Quebec’s flag at the Beijing Olympics.

Think big, act petty, I guess.

PQ: The initials stand for "Beatles Fan." No, really!

By Paul Wells - Monday, August 4, 2008 at 7:32 AM - 0 Comments

The embarrassing little episode where Paul McCartney’s Quebec City concert drew complaints because he’s British and so were Quebec’s conquerors drew so much attention in the rest of the country that it’s worth pointing out that Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois is still dealing with the damage that stance caused her party.

Now she’s warned her caucus not to take sides when depositing petitions at the National Assembly, because it was just such an action that caused three of her caucus members — Martin Lemay, Daniel Turp and Pierre Curzi — to decide complaining about McCartney was a brilliant idea. A caucus rule urging neutrality with regard to petitions seems a bit circuitous; Marois could simply have reminded her MNAs to try a little harder not to be cretins. But at least in Turp’s case, that counsel has long seemed particularly hard to follow.

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Memo to Mario: Hell isn't other people

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 10:48 AM - 0 Comments

Cartoon by Serge Chapleau, La Presse

Everybody and their soft-spoken, cerebral uncle (salut, Alain!) is writing Mario Dumont’s political obituary today, and for good reason: the luckless champ from Cacouna took it on his chiseled chin in three by-elections this week. In the Montreal riding of Pointe-Aux-Trembles, the ADQ came in a distant third; in Hull, Mario’s candidate lost badly to a guy whose claim to fame was that he was once choked by Jean Chrétien on live television. Indignity, thy name is Dumont.

In my very humble opinion, though, the ADQ loss in working class district of Bourget was by far the most telling, as it was here where the party flogged its ‘immigration is bad’ campaign that worked so well during the last election. In Bourget, Mario scapegoated immigrants once again, and he lost because of it. Badly. 

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Instant live big by-election update!

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, May 12, 2008 at 10:41 PM - 0 Comments

The status quo reigned tonight, with the PQ winning in two of the three by-elections, as predicted. Charest’s Liberals won in Hull. The ADQ was shut out completely, garnering nary a second place finish – despite two star candidates and a patented ‘blame the immigrants’ campaign in Bourget. “The ADQ drifts toward marginality,” reads the headline on canoe.ca.

As they say in these parts, ‘ayoye.’