Judging by the media attention he received, the new leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ), Éric Duhaime, had an excellent week. Not afraid of controversy, he managed to get people talking about him, which, for a politician at the head of a party that won a meager 1.5% of the votes in the last election, is an achievement.
Since he has led the PCQ, that is since April 2021, the formation, with a confidential influence when the businessman Adrien Pouliot was its leader, has filled up with members. While it had only 600 members, Éric Duhaime’s party would have encouraged 46,000 voters to swell its ranks, according to the latest count, thanks in particular to energetic activity on social networks.
Eric Duhaime’s recipe is a right-wing populism that attacks the elites, the traditional media, big government, which is fairly common. But the former host on private radio in Quebec also exploits a divisive vein: denouncing health measures, defending what he called “the sacrificed of COVID”.
As we can read in his laudatory biography written by his friend Frédéric Têtu and entitled Towards and for all, Éric Duhaime launched in the summer of 2020 in the broadcast of live videos on Facebook and a series of interviews with “people whose lives were shattered by health measures”. In August of the same year, he participated in the organization of a demonstration which brought together 3000 opponents of the obligation to wear a mask for primary school pupils in front of the National Assembly.
Éric Duhaime has thus chosen to be the spokesperson for anti-vaccines and to gather the support of conspirators. The arrival of Anne Casabonne, this actress who last September described the vaccine as “big shit”, only lengthened the list of members of the PCQ, according to the words of its leader. Even the boozy appearance of defector Claire Samson alongside him in a webcast didn’t seem to upset him. He seems to have made the adage his own: “Speak it well, speak it badly, but speak it up.” »
The Conservative leader intends to exploit the “new divisions”, the title of an opinion piece he signed in The Press. No more divisions between sovereignists and federalists and between supporters of the left and the right, Quebecers would be divided between the common people who suffer from health measures, like this “single-parent mother in a 4½ of HLM”, and the privileged who are doing well, the suburbanite who “lives in a spacious bungalow” and who also owns a chalet, these “political and media elites” who defend sanitary measures and who experience “stimulating professional moments” while receiving their full salary.
Éric Duhaime is an effective communicator who knows how to fuel controversy. But he is also a highly experienced strategist and political organizer. For ten years, he was a political adviser to the Bloc Québécois, working in particular with Gilles Duceppe. He was also part of Mario Dumont’s inner circle at the Action Démocratique du Québec and was even an advisor to the leader of the Canadian Alliance, Stockwell Day.
Intelligent as a monkey, Éric Duhaime knows perfectly well what he is doing when it comes to political positions and communication. His denunciation of François Legault’s “bluff” about the health contribution imposed on recalcitrants, if it is at the same time a defensible observation, was nonetheless a message to his unvaccinated supporters: do not submit to this vaccine authoritarianism, it will be without consequence.
The leader of the People’s Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier, fierce antivax, did not get vaccinated. No crazier than anyone else, Éric Duhaime is vaccinated. What he says he stands for is freedom of choice. After all, he is a libertarian, even if his biographer, in a tortuous attempt to refocus, presents him as a follower of classical liberalism.
The latest poll from the firm Léger, published by Quebecor this week, shows that the PCQ has made rapid progress. He can count on 12% of voting intentions among Francophones, and 22% in the Quebec region. What is revealing is that this support, at 76%, comes from voters “very dissatisfied” with the Legault government, even though they only constitute 21% of respondents.
Knowingly, the populist strategist has chosen the camp of the antivaccines, the great dissatisfied, even the enraged. Without bothering with scruples, Éric Duhaime finds his interest in exploiting, even feeding the discontent of what he calls the people. This is nothing to encourage social cohesion. We dare to believe that this exploitation of human misery for tactical purposes will not succeed in the long term.