(Drummondville) Unlike the last federal election, where he said he was in favor of forming a minority Conservative government in Ottawa, François Legault does not intend to tango with the party’s new elected leader, Pierre Polievre, to help him in his political battle against Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Posted at 3:58 p.m.
“I don’t know him,” Mr. Legault quickly said on Sunday, specifying that he had not spoken to him on Saturday, when he was elected as Conservative leader, and that he did not know his program.
In the midst of the election campaign in Quebec, the leader of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) is therefore taking a step back from the Conservative Party of Canada (PCC). In September 2021, during the last federal election, Mr. Legault stated that “Quebecers who are nationalists, who want the Quebec nation to have more power, must be wary of three parties: the Liberal Party, the NDP and the Green Party”. He said at the time that former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole had a good approach for Quebec.
During his election on Saturday as Conservative leader, Mr. Poilievre praised Quebec for “standing up to wokism”. François Legault does not see this statement as a foot call to attract his sympathy. Last September, the outgoing Prime Minister called his opponent from Québec solidaire Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois a “woke”. The latter had replied that Mr. Legault behaved like a “monarch” who expelled from Quebec those who do not think like him.
The CAQ leader no longer intends to use this word in the future, which has become charged in the political debate in Quebec as elsewhere. “You remember when I used the word “woke” with Mr. Nadeau-Dubois, who called me by another name. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t. I do not intend to pursue the definition and place of wokism,” he said on Sunday.
“In the heat of the moment, I can be impulsive. I shouldn’t have done that,” he concluded.