The Legault government made announcements in support of regional development this week, while the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, Dominique Anglade, presented her draft Charter of the Regions. It’s crazy how regions suddenly become important when the general election is on the horizon.
On Wednesday, François Legault traveled to Gaspésie–Îles-de-la-Madeleine with the minister responsible for the region, Jonatan Julien, to announce the establishment in 2023 of a branch of the Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR ) at the three CEGEP campuses in the region, in Gaspé, Carleton-sur-Mer and Îles-de-la-Madeleine. Then, the Prime Minister — and incidentally leader of the Coalition avenir Québec — announced, from the Gaspé wind turbine blade factory LM Wind Power, a major call for tenders for 2,300 megawatts of renewable energy.
The day before, the Minister of Transport, François Bonnardel, certainly hit the mark by announcing that round-trip tickets at $500 would be offered from the 1er June for about twenty air routes in Quebec, a question of stimulating the tourist industry, but also, more broadly, the local economy. $500 is a round figure, easy to remember, we agree. When’s the next $500 pledge? one might ask.
This offer comes two years after Air Canada abandoned almost all of its regional services in Quebec. Since then, regional air transport has been undergoing restructuring. Several details concerning this rebate program, which benefits from a substantial envelope of 281 million spread over five years, have not yet been finalized.
By making these announcements in the region, with hard cash at stake, the CAQ government would have liked to hide the unveiling by Dominique Anglade of his Charter of the Regions that he would not have done better. In the case of the Minister of Transport’s announcement, however, it is more of a coincidence, a coincidence of the kind that does things well. The press conference was supposed to be held two weeks ago, but François Bonnardel contracted COVID-19 and the event had to be postponed.
After these very concrete announcements, Dominique Anglade arrives with a bureaucratic restructuring project, accompanied by certain quantified measures and a statement of principle, the whole thing somewhat pompously called a “charter”. It promises to strengthen the powers of the ministers responsible for each region by creating regional secretariats under the responsibility of a deputy minister. This contingent of deputy ministers would report to the Secretary General of the Executive Council, the Prime Minister’s department.
It is not without interest. We will remember, however, that it was a Liberal government, that of Philippe Couillard, which axed the regional decision-making structures, namely the conferences of elected officials (CRE) and the local development centers (CLD).
As is customary for parties to solicit the regions during elections, Philippe Couillard allowed himself, in the 2018 campaign, to play the decentralization card by promising to move civil servants to the regions, including executives, of three ministries: Natural Resources, Forests and Agriculture. The mayor of Gaspé, Daniel Côté, now president of the Union des municipalités du Québec, repeated to him words attributed to René Lévesque, who had wanted to transfer the civil servants assigned to the fisheries to Gaspé (unsuccessfully, incidentally , even if a building was erected to shelter them): “It is easier to bring up a cod in Quebec than to bring down a civil servant in Gaspé. »
During the 2018 campaign, the CAQ had also promised to entrust responsibilities to the regions and to move civil servants there. The Legault government, which is pursuing the objective of moving 5,000 civil servants to the regions, is still in its infancy.
It will take much more than this charter for the Liberal Party to make a breakthrough in the regions. The latest Léger poll shows that the Liberals are still not doing better than 11% among Francophone voters. The party seems to start from afar, moreover. On its website, the file on cities and regions begins with this sentence: “The second largest province in the country behind Nunavut, Quebec is divided into 17 administrative regions. Not only is Quebec just one province among others—a term that the Quebec government, even under the Liberals, has not used since the 1970s—but it is no longer just a territory , creature of the federal government. Misery.