As luck would have it, the Legault government realized that the nature of the Omicron variant made it possible to relax the most unpopular health measures precisely when a new poll recorded a worrying shift in voting intentions for the CAQ.
While the whole of Quebec was preparing grumbling for another gloomy winter, the Prime Minister had on the contrary “good news” to announce Thursday. The curfew will be lifted, children will be able to return to school. Mr. Legault even hinted at the reopening of restaurants, bars, cinemas and other places of pleasure.
Of course, we can only rejoice. Suddenly, the need to reduce contact, which was an absolute imperative, no longer seems to matter. The new national director of public health, Dr.r Luc Boileau, explained that schools, considered until now as so many potential hotbeds, are simply a reflection of the situation in the community as a whole. The return to school is “safe”, he assured. If Horacio Arruda had said that, he would have been accused of complying with the wishes of the government.
Paradoxically, while we have not yet reached the “peak” of hospitalizations and that the number of daily deaths is reaching peaks, Mr. Legault suggested that we are almost out of the woods. A little more and he won’t be talking about a crisis, but about a new normal, which he will no doubt tell us we can be proud of.
Of course, the unvaccinated will not be able to benefit from this, but they will only have themselves to blame, right? Mind you, if things keep getting better, it may not be necessary to tax them anymore!
Compared to the Léger poll at the beginning of December, the CAQ has lost 8 points in voting intentions, according to the one carried out by Mainstreet between January 6 and 8, going from 46% to 38%, almost exactly the same result as in the election of 1er October 2018 (37.4%).
After two years of the pandemic, an 18-point lead over the main opposition party, in this case the PLQ, which is treading water, would certainly be encouraging for any government eight and a half months before an election.
At the end of the year, Mr. Legault had said he expected a certain drop, and he may not want to have to find an occupation for dozens of deputies eager to become ministers, but lose 8 points in one month n is not insignificant. Above all, it should not become a trend.
If this is simply a swing in the electorate’s mood due to the discontent caused by the reduction in holiday gatherings and the imposition of the curfew, it is likely that relaxations will eventually translate into voting intentions.
However, voters must be made to smile again before discontent crystallizes. And especially not to disappoint them another time. Mr. Legault is already starting to talk about spring, but he must now know that it does not necessarily arrive with the first swallow. If only the light at the end of the tunnel had to be red…
The government succeeded in putting out another fire on Friday, when the minister responsible for seniors, Marguerite Blais, temporarily interrupted her burnout leave to explain to coroner Géhane Kamel that the inflammatory statements that she had made on the CHSLD crisis in a shock interview granted to Radio-Canada in August 2020.
When she was asked where she was when the health network was put on a war footing by forgetting the CHSLDs, she let it be understood that it had taken too long to react to the warnings she had multiplied. If she had not succeeded in imposing her point of view, it was because the Prime Minister had not wanted to give her the power to do so, she said.
To the coroner, who was surprised to hear him present a version of the facts clearly more favorable to the government, Ms.me Blais argued that she had granted this interview when she lacked the perspective necessary for an objective analysis of the situation and that she was still under the influence of emotion. She no longer has the slightest memory of the problems she said she raised at the time and she assures us that all the decisions taken were made as a group.
She openly contradicted previous witnesses, including then-Health Minister Danielle McCann and Dr.r Arruda, according to which the alert on the particular vulnerability of CHSLDs to COVID-19 had been launched in January 2020. She herself would not have taken the measure of the danger until March 9, during the presentation of the now famous “Horacio show at the Prime Minister’s Office. In short, she is back in line. At the next traffic light.