Prime Minister Legault was right to say that the pandemic has fostered a new “national cohesion”, and he can legitimately congratulate himself on having contributed to it. Jason Kenney didn’t have the same success in Alberta.
The pandemic has another beneficial outcome for him.
It allows him to recycle promises made three years ago without being blamed for not having kept them, since he was devoting all his energies to facing the crisis. We can understand the frustration of the opposition parties, which will find it difficult to convince the population to be indignant at the heated opening speech.
On the eve of the 2018 elections, Philippe Couillard also promised to “change Quebec”. Asked to explain how things were going to be different, he had been unable to. Mr. Legault will not have to rack his brains to find a way to reinvent the wheel.
Decentralization of the health network, like access to a family doctor for all Quebecers, was already part of the CAQ’s promises in 2018. To hear Mr. Legault, the role of the Minister of Health should simply be to “set performance targets and monitor results”. It’s easier said than done. Shortly before his return to politics, Mr. Couillard was of the same opinion. However, he left Gaétan Barrette to centralize the network as never before.
On the other hand, he had pulled the rug under the feet of his minister when the latter had wanted to force general practitioners to take care of more patients. We will see how far will go the impatience of Mr. Legault, who has a lot on his heart, but who has already experienced a clash with doctors when he himself was at Health.
The business community was dismayed at how little the Prime Minister seemed to make of the labor shortage, in which he instead saw a great deal for workers, who can demand higher wages.
In the same way that he once planned to transform the St.Lawrence Valley into the Silicon Valley of the North, Mr. Legault now wants to make Quebec a global hub for electric transport, the battery industry and the production of electricity. green hydrogen.
We can dream of the day when we will build electric planes there, but that does not solve the immediate problem of companies desperate to find the manpower they urgently need.
It is certainly heartening to think that our exports of hydroelectricity to New York will eliminate the GHG emissions equivalent to a million cars, but the Prime Minister has carefully ignored those that will result from the third link here.
Mr. Legault once again spoke out against Ottawa’s intrusions into the health sector, but the tragedy of CHSLDs, which justifies federal intervention in the eyes of Justin Trudeau, is also a result of the pandemic.
It is remarkable that in his speech he did not use the word “autonomy” – the cornerstone of the CAQ – except to speak of food autonomy. It is true that Mr. Legault lost his federal election, but it is to wonder if his New project for the nationalists of Quebec should not be added to the list of virus victims. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon was not wrong to say that the question of Quebec’s status within Canada was “the elephant in the room”.