Elected officials from the Coalition avenir Québec also feel a sense of betrayal, a few days after the announcement of the abandonment of the third road link project between Quebec and Lévis.
They rail against the decision of the Prime Minister, François Legault, and the Minister of Transport, Geneviève Guilbault, to have kept them in the dark until the last minute and then claim to have made the controversial decision “as a team”.
Regional ministers Bernard Drainville (Chaudière-Appalaches) and Jonatan Julien (Capitale-Nationale), — who learned with amazement on Monday evening of the decision to abandon the flagship promise of the Coalition avenir Québec, then to announce it to the population three days later — are part of the lot.
“It’s really not easy for some, for some,” said Ms.me Guilbault in front of the parliamentary press, Thursday morning. “We must be sober and above all insist on the responsible, then pragmatic nature of this decision,” she added, after sitting in the press room where François Legault – or, at times, she – announced “tough decisions” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To kill the Quebec-Lévis third road link project, the Deputy Prime Minister was armed with voluminous ring binders containing a “sample” of the “studies and reports that have been made on this whole third link project”, the first of which dates from 1956.
His colleagues Bernard Drainville and Jonatan Julien were to be seated alongside him to present the new form of the project — a link reserved exclusively for public transit — according to the initial game plan of the communications team. But “it was not doing them a favor”, understood the Prime Minister’s Office, before dispatching Mme Guilbault to answer, alone, questions from journalists.
A government source says he has “rarely seen so much anger” within the CAQ parliamentary group since the 2018 election. “Notifying certain deputies after mayors has not passed,” she argues.
The decision of Legault and Guilbault
Prime Minister François Legault has drawn a line under the third road link project between Quebec and Lévis in the company of a handful of people, including Minister Geneviève Guilbault and his chief of staff, Martin Koskinen.
A way of doing things that is reminiscent of the “crisis unit”, made up of a few elected and unelected officials, who led the offensive against COVID-19 with ministerial decrees at a distance from both the Council ministers and the National Assembly.
Professor Olivier Turbide recalls the need, for a government in crisis management, “to control the message and the narrative around a controversial decision”, such as that of giving up a promise of the type: to build a tunnel under the river between Quebec and Levis. “The communication choices of the Prime Minister’s Office reflect this requirement, while avoiding any leaks and distortions of the message that disgruntled elected officials could have caused”, explains the political communication specialist.
“François Legault likes to compare the CAQ to a big family,” recalls the teacher in the Department of Social and Public Communication at UQAM. “Here, the father has decided and the children have to accept it. This shows the Prime Minister’s control over his caucus. However, there is a trade-off to this strategy. The government has not been able to publicly show the image of unity and coherence it usually projects, not to mention the ego wounds that the prime minister’s inner circle will have to deal with in the coming days,” says he.
Some have seen in the decision not to involve the CAQ caucus in the “difficult decision” to kill the third road link project a way of sheltering as many members as possible from the most violent repercussions of Readership. In other words, the latter can say that they have been faced with a fait accompli; that they could not say or do anything to try to save the interrives road project which had been in the cards of the CAQ for almost 10 years.
The Prime Minister’s Office has “let[é] the Caquiste deputies from the Quebec City region to address their constituents, in a mode of both surprise — they were not aware of the decision, therefore not complicit — and of disappointment,” observed Professor Turbid. The member for Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, Martine Biron, was plunged into dejection. “I’m hurt,” she dropped in front of the television cameras. The MP for Lévis, Bernard Drainville, was driven to tears. The former radio host apologized to voters feeling cheated. “The commitment I made was sincere,” he said, his voice half-choked with emotion, a few steps from the Blue Room. In the eyes of expert Olivier Turbide, the ex-journalist was “up to the personal shame felt at having to recant, the anger he must have received from his constituents, and his own anger at being somehow forced to turn around”. Despite all his resentment against the Legault government, the mayor of Lévis, Gilles Lehouillier, has also accepted Bernard Drainville’s act of contrition.
No apology from the Prime Minister, yet
The head of the CAQ, François Legault, has accustomed voters to seeing him apologize since his arrival at the helm of the state in the fall of 2018. He offered one to agronomist Louis Robert, who had been fired for to have denounced the interference of private interests in public research on pesticides. He presented it to Carol Dubé, after claiming that the problems of racism were resolved at the hospital where his spouse, Joyce Echaquan, died.
However, he refrained from making his mea culpa after having crossed out the third Quebec-Lévis road link from the list of promises of his political party, where he had appeared for six years, blaming the COVID-19 pandemic which has profoundly changed working habits — and teleworking — and, by extension, periods of congestion near the Quebec and Pierre-Laporte bridges.
François Legault took up the cause of the third road link – and opened hostilities against those who “watch[nt] looking down on the mothers and fathers of families who are caught in traffic every morning, every afternoon” — in the spring of 2017. “It shouldn’t be an empty promise. The people of Quebec are tired of being fooled, ”he said on the Samuel-De Champlain promenade, flanked in particular by the member for La Peltrie, Éric Caire.
“In view of the way in which the Prime Minister has publicly compromised himself in recent years in this project, his apologies or, at least, explanations appear necessary. Even if he benefits from an enormous capital of sympathy, that he is only at the beginning of his mandate and that outside the region of Quebec, a majority of citizens seem to agree with this reversal , apologizing is an act of elementary accountability,” argues Olivier Turbide of UQAM. According to him, the “word” of the Prime Minister must be believed. “Otherwise, it is cynicism that risks being further reinforced, and the relationship of trust between François Legault and citizens that is likely to be undermined. »