“We give him a good wrinkled ? Failing to hope to win the riding he was visiting on day 2 of the campaign and to express himself correctly in French, François Legault told the CAQ candidate who faces Pascal Bérubé in Matane-Matapédia that everyone had to give him less for his money.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Well, it’s finally the Prime Minister who is in the process of being paid for quite a ride since the start of a campaign where all the leaders – except himself, it seems – have visibly the knife between their teeth.
It is still too early to know if the very outcome of the ballot will be affected – this super majority that the head of the CAQ coveted -, but his ride has for more than three weeks taken on the worrying appearance of an old rugged roller coaster. .
I do not understand the first clumsiness of the campaign, that of deciding to spend more than a month on a simple “Let’s continue” which, while not saying much, exposes the candidate’s record even more to criticism. So no one had taken notes, following Denis Coderre’s cushy and disastrous campaign, in 2017, carried out on the theme of “Together, let’s continue the work”? Having nothing else to offer than a balance sheet and an air of beef, the mayor of Montreal was then beaten by a smiling Valérie Plante who really wanted to be elected.
Strengthened by their starting position, François Legault and the CAQ should have taken the opportunity to ask for a strong “mandate” from the population to achieve something significant. What good is the election of 100 deputies if they do not collectively represent strong support for a key idea? A show of force in Ottawa, for example to recover all the instruments of our “cultural sovereignty” as Robert Bourassa already demanded in 1971, for whom it was “a matter of life or death for Quebec”. This could have been a great challenge for a party whose federalism is today assumed and in which the sovereignist wing has agreed to submit, or even to disappear.
Things would have been different if François Legault had at least said, like Éric Duhaime, about independence: the door is closed, but I keep the key.
Anyone who has seen the hit movie cosmic denial (Don’t Look Up) will remember how difficult it is to interest voters in certain issues, no matter how existential. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is the only one who points to the sky and who demonstrates the real threat of linguistic and demographic decline at the same time as that concerning climate change. He is getting growing success, four more points in the voting intentions in a few weeks, but it is still far from enough. On screen, the apocalyptic satire ends badly and even Leonardo DiCaprio can’t help it. Let’s hope the reality turns out to be different.
The Prime Minister, on the other hand, comes up with very curious answers when he is reminded that inexorably, the weight of Quebec in Canada and its representation in the House of Commons are destined to diminish to the point of total insignificance. Even more in a context where Canada will receive approximately 450,000 immigrants per year. François Legault, in a sovereignist reflex, then praises Switzerland and the Scandinavian states, small countries, he says, which are doing very well. He conveniently forgets, he, the new federalist, that they have something very different from the province of Quebec that he leads: the attributes of a country. There is, let’s face it, very little risk that the Norwegians will impose on the Swedes policies they do not want while demanding from them the payment of half of their taxes…
The head of the CAQ still has a few reasons to smile. The opposition remains more fragmented than ever, and this is increasingly proving to be its lifeline. Then, after all, he’s not the only one running a bad campaign. Dominique Anglade has the wrinkled of a life from the beginning: absence of candidates, crowd, monumental error in the budgetary framework. And, above all and beyond the electoral contest, the PLQ is not interested in the future of the French-speaking majority in Quebec which, moreover, as we can see, pays it back. As for Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, much to his very great satisfaction with himself after having designated himself as the sole opponent of François Legault, he should finally acknowledge loud and clear that the application of his environmental program will require leaving the Quebec of Canada, this oil State which will remain so.