Whatever may be said, a government entering an election year will rarely prorogue a parliamentary session to open a new one when it feels that things are totally to its liking.
Of course, François Legault and the Coalition d’avenir Québec (CAQ) have been sucking up almost all the political oxygen for months, leaving only rare scents for the opposition parties, which have not yet found the means to get their messages across as the management of the pandemic has taken up all the space.
But things can change quickly in an election year. This is why it was important for the government to open the debate on what will have to happen after the pandemic. If only because voters tend not to vote to reward the performance of governments during the term that is coming to an end, but rather for what they would like to achieve in a new term.
With this opening speech, Prime Minister Legault indicated that unless there is always a possible new wave of the pandemic, politics will take back its rights from now on.
And it is therefore a vast political program that François Legault exposed in this opening speech. A program for the last year of the mandate, but also for a possible second mandate. This has the advantage of promising a lot of things, without being tied to a too precise schedule and without any idea of how much it could cost.
The most important of all its promises concern health, which is quite normal, since the pandemic has shown everyone how fragile our system is.
But the solution is first and foremost administrative: the network needs to be decentralized to the regions. Except that it will be necessary to prove that it is by bringing decisions closer to the field that we will resolve the problems arising from collective agreements negotiated at the national level.
Decentralization, in itself, is a good thing and will certainly solve problems at the local level. But that will not make it possible to abolish compulsory overtime for nurses, the use of private agencies, it will not solve the fact that 4 out of 10 jobs are part-time nor find the 60,000 health workers that we will need. within five years.
At the start of its mandate, the Legault government decided not to embark on a major structural reform, as the previous government had done. The CAQ said it did not want to “play in the structures”.
There is also a series of promises which Mr. Legault takes up and which were announced and never put into practice by his predecessors.
Transferring civil service jobs to the regions? René Lévesque had promised that any new government agency would henceforth have its headquarters elsewhere than in Quebec or Montreal. It never happened. A fundamental reform of vocational training? It was a priority for Jacques Parizeau. Keep older workers in the workforce? It was one of Jean Charest’s big goals.
Of all this series of projects, it should be noted that the environment remains more than ever the blind spot of the CAQ government. Essentially, Mr. Legault is relying on our “old won” and the hydroelectric complexes built during the 1960s and 1970s for Quebec to become the “green battery” of the northeast of the continent.
But that should not allow Quebec not to give itself clear commitments to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by saying that our contribution will be to sell clean electricity to Massachusetts and New York State. .
Likewise, decreeing that it “definitively renounces the extraction of hydrocarbons on its territory” is almost laughable when we know that there are no commercially exploitable hydrocarbon reserves in Quebec.
We will also note the total absence of the metropolis of Quebec in the priorities of the government. The word “Montreal” has never passed the Prime Minister’s lips. Nothing about the housing crisis – which is raging across Quebec, but which particularly affects the metropolitan region. Nothing about public transportation, nothing about homelessness, nothing about public safety or the proliferation of guns.
The Prime Minister ended his opening speech for the new session by talking about the aboriginal file. Mr. Legault acknowledged “that Indigenous nations have suffered a particularly cruel form of racism with policies that aimed to erase their identity, culture and history” and that this has caused “deep wounds” passed down from generation to generation.
But all this, it will be noted, is conjugated in the past tense. At most, there is now a desire to “combat discrimination and racism” that Aboriginal people still experience.
It is a speech that marks the end of the pandemic and the start of the political season. A speech that does not target the next 11 months, but much more the next election campaign.