There are times in politics, especially at the top of the pyramid, when we feel very alone. This is even more true when life insists on throwing grouped troubles at you. The weight of responsibility is overwhelming. All eyes are on you. The advice you are given always has the same characteristic: it is contradictory. From gloomy days to sleepless nights, you try to imagine a way out. A change of direction? A strategic retreat? A completely new avenue? Or even a bidding war.
It happened that François Legault emerged from these vortexes with the necessary eureka. His greatest feat was obviously to pretend that he was no longer an independentist in order to create a pragmatic coalition allowing him to take power in order to deploy his interventionist economic instincts and bring Quebec closer to its Holy Grail: equaling the average income. of Ontario. Everything else (secularism, French, immigration) are just figures imposed by reality.
During the pandemic, he got up from a sleepless night with another innovation: why not invent rapid training for beneficiary attendants and promise graduates $26 per hour to quickly plug the holes caused by illness and shortage ? He was right. And following its momentum, proposed elsewhere – more recently under construction – this model of accelerated and paid training. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than nothing.
Striking a big blow, in the face of a big pitfall, sometimes seems irresistible. There is something exhilarating in the announcement of an unexpected, ambitious, extraordinary decision. The problem is to distinguish good ideas from false good ideas. The accelerated training of agents was excellent, the return of the third link and the abolition of popular financing, mediocre.
We know that François Legault demonstrated his judgment when making difficult decisions. His decision to remove the crucifix from the National Assembly simultaneously with the adoption of the law on secularism went against the grain of public opinion, particularly the CAQ. It was the right move. Like that of respecting the acquired rights of veiled employees.
The application of the exemption provision to this law and to Law 96 on French constituted, at the time when this step was taken, proof of audacity and determination. You had to want. His insistence on offering healthcare employees differentiated increases is also an innovation that we owe to him and which is beneficial.
This propensity to go beyond the framework, however, led him to endorse ambitious and costly, but ill-considered, projects. His obsession with extending four-year kindergartens to all four-year-olds while schools are collapsing — literally and figuratively — has diverted energy that should have been put elsewhere into this useless hobby (in the land of CPEs). The colossal sums sunk into seniors’ homes, which will never, in a realistic scenario, eventually replace CHSLDs, should have been invested in renovating them and extending home care.
The announcement of the creation of “Blue Spaces” museums in each region is coming up against the constraints of reality – and the underfunding of existing regional museums. Legault also agreed to endorse other oddities, such as maintaining that he would let in immigrants intended to be permanent, but that after three years, if they failed a values and language test, he would take away their rights. their papers and would ask Ottawa to deport them. (I was told that this idea came from a Belgian advisor, who has since disappeared. Fortunately.)
I am assured that the decision to withdraw from popular financing and to propose its abolition in law was a collective proposal. “It has become impossible to receive private donations and manage public funds,” they explain to me, “our government, and any other, is made like a rat.” “There is only one, radical, way out. » So it happens that Legault is poorly advised. Even if we found it good, this proposal was going to be rejected by the other parties. And if the Coalition Avenir Québec decided to use its majority to vote for it, alone, in the Assembly (which Legault ruled out), it would probably be judged unconstitutional, because it prohibits citizens from expressing, with their wallets , their freedom of political expression.
On QUB, yesterday, former liberal minister Marie Montpetit compared the clean slate proposed by Legault on financing to that of Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon in the face of the difficulties Northvolt is experiencing with the greens. “If the population does not want the project,” he said last week, “there will be no project. » As if, in 2024 and everywhere in the West, any major industrial project did not have to go through numerous stages and controversies before seeing the light of day. I remember discussing with Gary Doer, former NDP premier of Manitoba who became Canadian ambassador to Washington, the progress of a Hydro transmission line project in the American Northeast. “It’s a mile, an avocado,” he told me. A reality that we simply have to deal with.
Obviously, the Northvolt case would be easier if the government had not voluntarily changed a few rules, cut a few corners, refused to hold a BAPE examination, to land it. But there, as in the case of financing, we are in the presence of a somewhat childish reaction: “If it’s like that, I’m not playing anymore. »
Even if I am not a CAQ, I am in no way happy about the Legault government’s descent into hell. He is now weakened. I am not sure that his reforms in education and health are the right ones. But for us to know, he must retain the authority required to enforce them. He doesn’t have it anymore. His weakness does not bode well for the crucial issues that oppose him to the federal government, notably the thorny issue of immigration.
When Legault was strong, Ottawa sometimes said no to him (in health, in particular), but feared him enough to agree to give in from time to time – as with the introduction into the Constitution of a non-binding clause affirming that Quebec forms a nation. Now that he only heads a government on borrowed time, he will only be entitled to the minimum service. If he were at the end of his term, it would just be a bad time to go through. But there are still two and a half years to go. It’s long. Unless he decides, the day after a gloomy day and a sleepless night, that if it’s like that, he won’t play anymore.