A bit like you do with a ham, you have to know how to prepare the voter. Whether you dip it in salt or roll it in flour, the important thing is to refine it long enough. Either to taste it in thin slices, or to collect the ballot.
MP Bernard Drainville practices this subtle art, as we saw during the last election campaign.
Do you remember ? He was all boiling with indignation on the banks of the St. Lawrence River when journalists asked him: do you have studies to justify a tunnel between Quebec and Lévis?
Listen to him: “People are getting more and more tired of being told, ‘You don’t need it!’ Oh yes? So come to our region, put yourself in line in the morning or in the evening… You will tell me after that, that I don’t need it, 3e link ! »
Waiting, he said, is “hellish”. What was it based on? He had talked to people. Mr. Drainville is close to the elector as the artisan refiner is close to his ham. He listens to it, he is so fine.
Yes, but Mr. Drainville, insisted the journalists, do you have studies?
“The expectation that we live, it does not need to be studied,” he replied.
You have to be arrogant above the average to say such a thing: we are going to spend 6 or 8 or more probably 10 billion, but we don’t need a study: we see people in cars!
Because a bit like the former smoker who goes crazy smelling the slightest smell of tobacco, Mr. Drainville, the radio host who is very critical of this project, has become its champion in all categories.
He was elected with a majority of 10,000 votes.
Seven months later, faced with the official abandonment of this project, here is our sheepish deputy who apologized to the people of Lévis and Chaudière-Appalaches.
It’s good at least.
All of these people got screwed over. We understand the mayor of Lévis, Gilles Lehouillier, to feel betrayed. The partial studies, paid for by the citizen, that they refused to show us were supposed to justify this project. They are now partially revealed to say the opposite.
What does Deputy Drainville say? Listen to him, Thursday morning in the corridor of the National Assembly, it’s worth it:
“The traffic I saw last summer was real. I sincerely believed that the patient traffic that we saw last summer was the new normal. And then obviously, once the work has been completed [sur le pont Pierre-Laporte], the new normal post-pandemic traffic is not what we had before and that’s what the studies show. And so the data that reflects reality shows that a motorway link is not justified. »
That is absolutely extraordinary.
This Minister of Education told us last year: I don’t need to study, but to see, we can see. And today: ah well torpinouche, it was because of the work on the bridge… Hon, excuse me…
He hadn’t noticed the construction on the bridge, I imagine.
And now he talks to us about studies and “data that reflect reality”.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t blame the Legault government for canceling this project. I don’t even blame him for caressing it.
What is unbearable in this whole affair, and it affects many areas of political action, is the obstinate refusal during two elections to rationally discuss the problem and the feasibility of the solution. Is it too much to ask for public policies based on evidence “that reflect reality”?
What is painful is the politics-ham. A version of what the Americans call “pork barrel politics”: the voter is fed with public funds to ensure their loyalty, regardless of the relevance of the project.
And the best part is seeing Mr. Drainville playing insulted. To MP Marwah Rizqy who very legitimately stung him about the 3e link, he shouted that she was a “demagogue”. And there he is, theatrically leaving the Blue Room, all crumpled up. Cyrano to whom we dare to speak of his nose.
Demagogy! He dares to pronounce this word while he is still dripping with it, seven months after having promised the largest infrastructure project in Quebec “with no studies”?
I understand that is hard to swallow. We put it in front of its own recipe.
Bon appetit, Minister.