Since coming to power, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) has seen one of its members resign less than a year after her election because she had not been appointed minister, another leave the caucus because she felt like she was a green plant and a third not to run again because she found the party line unbearable.
Other times, other manners. Two biographies which have just been published remind us that there was a time when a parliamentarian whose merits were recognized by all could be excluded from the cabinet without making a fuss and find a way to express his or her thoughts, may it please or not. No question of taking his hole in the hope of obtaining advancement.
Louise Harel, who had been calling the shots in the Parti Québécois (PQ) for years, had to wait three years after her election in Maisonneuve, in 1981, to enter the Council of Ministers. René Lévesque would have liked to muzzle this eternal rebel by appointing her vice-president of the National Assembly, but he must have suspected that she would refuse the position.
The title of the biography that the former journalist and ex-president of the Société de transport de Montréal Philippe Schnobb dedicated to him, Louise Harel. Without compromisesums up well what constituted a problem in the eyes of Mr. Lévesque and which we would sometimes wish for others.
Gérald Godin, the poet who accomplished the feat of beating Robert Bourassa in his own riding in 1976, and who everyone saw in Cultural Affairs, also waited three years before being appointed minister. Too far to the left for the taste of the chef, who would even have preferred that the PQ candidate in Mercier be… Louise Harel. The one who inherited Cultural Affairs, Denis Vaugeois, is of the opinion that “Mr. Lévesque was not ready to bring a journalist to the Council of Ministers”.
It was necessary to wait almost 20 years after the death of the novelist, which occurred in 1994, for Jonathan Livernois, professor of literary and intellectual history at Laval University, to retrace in a book simply entitled Godin the journey of this other rebel, who sometimes described himself as an “eternal romantic dissident”, sometimes as a “radical-realist”. His biographer speaks of a “left-wing duplesism”.
If Louise Harel and Gérald Godin shared the same allergy to submission, they had two very different ways of doing politics. As a good disciple of Machiavelli, the member for Maisonneuve maneuvered in the shadows and methodically placed her pawns, while her unpredictable colleague from Mercier favored public forums, making declarations that made her colleagues cringe.
In 1977, while his government was planning a referendum on sovereignty-association, this unconditional independence activist simply declared on CJAD that “Quebec can achieve its objectives within the federation”.
In 1983, despite the October crisis, the fallacious promises made by Pierre Elliott Trudeau during the referendum campaign and the patriation of the Constitution, he still said that “since his reign in Ottawa, Trudeau has done appreciable work for a large number of of businesses and citizens in Quebec. He even found it advantageous to have “a good government in Quebec and a chum in Ottawa.
It is difficult to imagine a CAQ MP, even more so a minister, making such iconoclastic comments. Moreover, François Legault would perhaps not have the same tolerance as René Lévesque. It is true that the CAQ is his creation, while the PQ was never that of its founder, who never really controlled it.
In 1982, when the government and the PQ were in the midst of a crisis, Louise Harel voted against the special law which decreed the working conditions of state employees. How many CAQ deputies would have the courage to do the same if the current standoff with the common front degenerated to this point? For five years, no one dared to denounce the stupidity of the third link, and there is no indication that it will be any different now that Mr. Legault has decided to resurrect it.
In the fall of 1987, none other than Gérald Godin would have had the nerve to demand the departure of Pierre Marc Johnson and the arrival of Jacques Parizeau, who was himself taken by surprise, but seeing Louise Harel join the mutiny n There was nothing very surprising about it. The first one found a way to apologize. Impeached in the national council by the supporters of the resigning leader, the second refused.
In everyone’s eyes, the pasionaria from eastern Montreal and the deputy-poet from the Plateau were inseparable from the metropolis. This one had grown up in Sainte-Thérèse, and this one in Trois-Rivières. The time of the rebels was also the time when Montreal and the rest of Quebec were not yet in separate rooms.