Change your attitude… | The Press

With the tone reserved for teenagers before sending them to their rooms to think, Prime Minister François Legault solemnly warned his fellow citizens that they needed to “change their attitude” towards the economic and energy policies of his government.

It’s worth quoting his speech on Thursday morning: “We really need to change our attitude in Quebec. So, yes, we have to find ways to save electricity, whether it’s public transport, whether it’s energy efficiency. We must try to consume less electricity. Yes, we have to build wind power, but we won’t get out of it, there, it will take more dams then it will take factories, the green economy like Northvolt, like GM, like Ford, like d other projects. »

Quebecers therefore have an attitude problem. The Prime Minister repeated in other words what his minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said last month when speaking of the “judicialization of the Northvolt case” and the message that this sent to foreign investors. “My fear is that Quebec’s credibility will be affected,” said the minister.

In fact, the government is very concerned about citizens contesting a project that is close to its heart. It is to the point that the government claims that the review of the Office of Public Environmental Hearings is not necessary at this stage of the project.

There are several problems with this attitude of the government. First, in a rule of law, we cannot blame citizens who want to exercise a remedy that is permitted to them by law.

But above all, the government cannot ignore the fact that there appears to have been preferential treatment given to Northvolt, for which a tailor-made change to the criteria requiring the holding of BAPE hearings would have been made.

Last February, the threshold to trigger a BAPE examination for the manufacture of cathodes increased from 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes. However, according to our colleagues at Radio-Canada, the future factory will produce 56,000. “Tailor-made” obtained after contacts with Northvolt.

Since then, several civil society actors and former BAPE commissioners have denounced the situation, believing that it was an unacceptable regression on the very principles on which the creation of the government body is based.

What’s more, governments have invested considerable sums in Northvolt, whether through subsidies or equity investments by entities such as the Caisse de dépôt. The government of Quebec, in particular, finds itself judge and party in this matter.

In the circumstances, it is a little tricky for a prime minister to tell citizens who want to uphold the rule of law “to change their attitude” when their government does not seem to care too much.

Especially since public hearings would make it possible to respond to certain legitimate objections on the Northvolt project. There is now a problem of social acceptability, not because it is in itself a bad project, but because there are too many unanswered questions from the government for whom the cause was already heard even before its announcement. On this point, the Legault government can only blame itself.

But we will also note that, in this same press briefing, the Prime Minister repeated that his vision of economic development had not changed: energy saving will not be enough. We will need more dams, more factories, including those of Ford and GM – which suddenly become, in the words of the Prime Minister, pillars of the green economy.

In short, we come back to the Dollarama of energy that Sophie Brochu so feared during her too brief mandate at the head of Hydro-Québec: an economy and development based on more and more electricity production, whatever be the means.

A model taken straight from the 1970s, when energy-intensive companies were attracted, even if it meant building ever more dams.

As misfortune never comes alone, all this had to happen in a week where the CAQ government failed to get rid of the problem of funding cocktails where you had to pay to meet ministers. Even for a bereaved family who wanted to talk about drunk driving with the Minister of Transport.

A week after wanting to put this whole affair behind him by renouncing popular funding and challenging his adversaries to do the same, Prime Minister Legault finds himself in the situation he wanted to avoid: we are still talking about the cocktails of the CAQ.

It’s a vicious circle: the more we talk about it, the more difficult it becomes to think that there was not an informal slogan or some system aimed at financing the party by monetizing, directly or indirectly, the access to ministers for the benefit of the CAQ electoral fund.

In the circumstances, one might wonder who would most need to change their attitude…

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