Even though I have never been a great admirer of the Conservative Party of Canada, I nevertheless witness with concern its current stalemate in Canadian-style Trumpism.
The quality of both debates in English who started the leadership race was dismal. Jean Charest reached heights of opportunism there while his main opponent, Pierre Poilièvre, defended a right-wing liberalism of adolescent caliber which is hardly better than the rantings of Maxime Bernier. These two, along with the others, share the oil dogma and have nothing, nothing, nothing to offer Quebec, except legal challenges to Bill 21.
I was listening to this and I said to myself that the Liberals had gone for a reign of at least 20 years. For whom, in fact, will the moderate Canadian of the center right who does not adhere to the liberal management be able to vote? For no one.
As for the Quebec nationalists, dumped by all the federalist formations, they can consider themselves lucky to be able to take refuge in the Bloc Quebecois, without which they would be condemned to vote literally against Quebec. No, I never voted Conservative, but witnessing the sinking of this Canadian institution does not make me happy because this spectacle seems to me to announce a democratic deficit.
I was thinking about all this while reading In the big leagues… and stage managers (Septentrion, 2022, 204 pages), the recent book by retired journalist Gilbert Lavoie, devoted to his experience as press secretary to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1989 to 1992. Ideologically closer to liberal thought than conservative according to his own words, Lavoie then accepted the challenge “for Mulroney and his attitude towards Quebec”. Today, he specifies, and since Stephen Harper more precisely, such a leap would be impossible for him. The days of the Clarks and the Mulroneys, open to Quebec’s nationalist demands, are well and truly over.
Journalist at LaPresse, from 1975 to 1989, and Sun, from 1994 to 2018, Lavoie received Mulroney’s call in March 1989, at the start of the Conservative Prime Minister’s second term. As press secretary, his role mainly consists in preparing, with his team, the answers to the questions addressed to the ministers by the media. Lavoie will not be bored since his time in the Prime Minister’s Office will coincide with the death of the Meech Lake Accord, the Oka Crisis, a recession, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the war in Iraq.
Although he graduated in history from the University of Toronto, Lavoie, born in Rimouski in 1948, in an agricultural environment, does not intend to work as a historian with this book, which he simply presents as a testimony, embellished with portraits and anecdotes as well as a reflection on the excesses of political information.
Reading the portrait he draws of Mulroney, one says to oneself that he was Quebec’s last “blue” ally at the federal level and that this is, basically, what explains the hostility of the English-language media to his place. If he returns to Meech, in particular to deplore the undermining work of Pierre Elliott Trudeau against the agreement, Lavoie does not offer, for the rest, an analysis of the reign of Mulroney. Rather, he speaks of the attitude of the man who, he says, truly loved people and knew how to maintain cordial relations with the political leaders of his time—Bush senior, Mitterrand and Thatcher—for the benefit of Canadian influence in the world.
Mulroney liked to surround himself with Quebecers from the regions, in his inner circle, to overcome the loneliness of power. In November 1990, during a fundraising evening for The duty, he confided to Lise Bissonnette, his neighbor at the table, that he is “so much better off here than in Regina”. In Canada, such an attitude earns you ostracism.
From his experience on both sides of the barricade, Lavoie finally draws some journalistic lessons. Political information, he notes, is too often treated as an object of entertainment. The journalist, under the pressure of continuous news on a multitude of platforms, “is no longer waiting for the event, he must constantly provoke it in order to feed the beast”. We thus linger over insignificant details, we favor speed over accuracy and we look for political pettiness by neglecting the equally important oversight of business people.
Lavoie, who worked his entire career for the Desmarais family, includes in his book the letter he sent to his ex-employer to denounce the abandonment of retirees from the Gesca newspapers, following the sale of the company in 2015. “It is important, he writes, to demonstrate that even behind men of good will, corporate interests have no heart. ” Well said.