Last Saturday, 500 Liberals gathered to celebrate Jean Charest and celebrate the 20th anniversary of their taking power in 2003.
Part of me understands this nostalgia.
When I find my old companions from the Bouchard and Landry governments, we remember our successes, our blunders and the moments that made us laugh to tears.
One day I will tell them.
Responsibility
Voting intentions in favor of the PLQ among Francophones are currently at 4%: one Francophone out of 25.
Do you know many French-speaking liberals in your entourage who display themselves proudly?
The only ones I see are columnists or elected officials. The others hug the walls.
A question bothers me.
The united Liberals highlighted the “great achievements” of the Charest years.
- Listen to the column of Joseph Facal, columnist for the Journal de Montréal & the Journal de Québec at the microphone of Richard Martineau on QUB-radio :
However, when Jean Charest left his post, he was the least appreciated prime minister of all by Quebecers, just before Philippe Couillard.
Are these festive liberals totally out of touch or are all these Quebecers who deny them too dumb to know how to recognize these “great achievements”?
“Great Achievements”? Few and minor, especially compared to the record of two other long-serving Liberal prime ministers, Robert Bourassa and Jean Lesage.
Essentially, Jean Charest, brought from Ottawa to avoid a third referendum, capitalized on the fear of it.
If the Liberals see him in their soup, he was winning an election. That’s all that matters to the PLQ.
I have a second question.
Didn’t a small interior voice, called the conscience, work these liberals who feasted and did not make them wonder what are the shares of responsibility of MM. Charest and Couillard in the current dilapidation of the PLQ?
The PQ is also light years away from its heyday.
But the PQ’s slide began after the failure of the 1995 referendum and accelerated with the departure of Lucien Bouchard.
Any party would have had its back broken by the failure of what is its raison d’être.
Six chefs have succeeded one another after Lucien Bouchard. It is therefore impossible to blame the odious decline, spread over nearly 25 years, on one of them in particular.
In the case of the PLQ, the decline was immediate and attributable, for the most part, to this perception of a party rotten to the core and more concerned with minorities than with French-speaking Quebecers.
There it is, the true legacy of the Charest-Couillard years.
- Listen to the column of Joseph Facal, columnist for the Journal de Montréal & the Journal de Québec at the microphone of Richard Martineau on QUB-radio :
Shame
All in all, the PQ today is less badly taken than the PLQ.
It is still the bearer of an ideal, while the PLQ knows that it can only offer the Canada of today and its continual contempt for Quebec.
The PQ is also not perceived as being of questionable morality or as a party that has turned against its own people.
The PQ may not be doing very well, but I don’t know any PQ member who is ashamed to come out as such.