The Parti Québécois (PQ) finally signed an agreement on Friday with the other parties for the recognition of parliamentary groups in the Blue Room. Chef Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said he made “some modest gains before signing a discount agreement”.
After bringing the parliamentary negotiations to the public square last week because it “had no leverage”, the PQ managed to obtain “7% of the questions instead of 5%”, which means two questions per week, has writes Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon in a publication posted on Facebook.
As far as the budget is concerned, the political party will receive $570,000 instead of $495,000, which will allow it to hire one more employee. It will be entitled to an “observer” seat in the Bureau of the National Assembly determining the internal functioning and the organization of work during a parliamentary session.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon claimed to have gone “to seek the maximum” for the PQ in the circumstances by signing the agreement with the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) and Québec solidaire (QS). He deplores conditions “where our counterparts are judges and parties, where there is no bargaining power, no independent process and very, very little good faith”.
On Wednesday, the PQ “learned that a written offer excluding us had begun to circulate between the three parties and that they were ready to sign it without our agreement,” said the leader. This procedure is legal, because the regulations of the National Assembly require a strong consensus and not unanimity for such an agreement, he explains.
In the context, Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon resigned himself to signing an agreement so as not to lose his status as chief allowing him to ask questions at the Blue Room.
The PQ elected official accused Prime Minister François Legault of not having kept his word when he said the day after the elections “that we had to be sensitive to the democratic distortions of the last ballot and that we should not accentuate them further” .
The Parti Québécois won 14.61% of the popular vote on October 3, but only three seats in the National Assembly. The official opposition won 14.37% of the vote, but 21 constituencies. This number will drop to 19 on December 1 with the departure of former chef Dominique Anglade. Québec solidaire has 11 elected members and won 15.43% by universal suffrage.
With Francois Carabin
More details will follow