If his candidacy is confirmed, Pablo Rodriguez will change the course of the race for the leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ). He would be the most experienced, both in government work and in electoral organization. And he would not be too disoriented either.
Mr. Rodriguez is known for his role in Ottawa. After serving as Minister of Canadian Heritage, he is now head of Transport, in addition to being a political lieutenant in Quebec and having led the last three federal election campaigns there.
But before making the jump to Ottawa, two decades ago, he campaigned for the PLQ. In the early 2000s, in particular, during the party’s by-elections, such as in Mercier and Vimont.
And he was vice-president of the youth wing in the early 1990s when the Allaire report created a schism that led to the departure of Mario Dumont, then to the creation of the Action démocratique du Québec. (ADQ). This career path is little known – I learned this in the recent essay In search of power.
Mr. Rodriguez is best known for his activism in the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), which began in parallel in the early 1990s.
Mr. Rodriguez will not be the only one to claim such roots in the PLQ. Another putative candidate, the former president of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce of Quebec Charles Milliard, campaigned in the youth wing of the PLQ.
Two other candidates are being considered. There is the young mayor of Victoriaville, Antoine Tardif, who was an advisor to Conservative MP Alain Rayes and who knows the rural reality thanks to his work at the Fédération québécoise des municipalités.
And PLQ MP Frédéric Beauchemin, finance and economics critic and former general manager and head of capital markets at Scotiabank. Their notoriety remains low, and they have no ministerial experience.
Denis Coderre, the only confirmed candidate, is, along with Mr. Rodriguez, the only one to have been a member of a government.
Experience, however, has become a double-edged sword. It forces a candidate to defend his past ideas and makes him lose the luster of novelty. Still, Mr. Rodriguez will be able to put forward some elements of his background.
He was responsible for the last three PLC campaigns in Quebec. Each time, his party won, both in terms of votes and seats. He has crisscrossed the territory and knows all the regions.
In 2019, Justin Trudeau finally appointed a lieutenant for Quebec. It was Mr. Rodriguez, who was supposed to resolve the impasses between the federal government and the CAQ government. Of course, the premiers resolve thorny issues directly among themselves, but a lieutenant is useful, for example, to explain the specificities of Quebec to English-speaking ministers who are ignorant or insensitive to them.
Mr. Rodriguez honed his skills as both a debater and negotiator as House Leader of the minority government from 2019 to 2021.
Mr. Coderre has also been a minister, but his experience is more distant and limited: less than two years at the head of Immigration, from 2002 to 2003. He was mayor of Montreal, which gave him concrete experience on issues such as housing. However, he subsequently suffered two defeats, after blowing a comfortable lead. He is also known for his confusing and contradictory statements as well as his difficulty working in a team, which is not the case with Mr. Rodriguez.
What would a Rodriguez platform look like? Hard to say.
Apart from his work in Transport, we have recently heard him speak mainly about language and immigration.
In the Trudeau government, he defended the reform that recognized for the first time that French had the dual status of official language and vulnerable language. Montreal MPs opposed the recognition of the new Bill 101, and such a movement exists in the PLQ. This debate will be perilous for all candidates.
Mr. Rodriguez denounced American companies that complain about French language signage – “let them adapt,” he responded.
But on the other hand, he has often taken aside nationalists who worry about the decline of French as a mother tongue.
An Argentine immigrant, he arrived in Quebec at the age of 8 with his parents and spoke only Spanish. This made his family a factor in the decline of French.
Mr. Rodriguez sometimes gets emotional when he talks about immigration. He is a refugee. His father was imprisoned and tortured by the Argentine military junta, and because he could not get his degree recognized, he worked as a cleaner and frequented food banks when he arrived in Quebec before finally obtaining a doctorate at age 50 and becoming a university professor again.
So much for the family story.
Mr. Rodriguez is not known to have any economic thinking. He will have to clarify it – the PLQ is banking on this to reconnect with what brought it to power in the past. Mr. Rodriguez will also have to surround himself well to navigate through the complex issues in education and health.
However, I have the impression that these issues will not be at the heart of his probable campaign.
Before he can be a prime minister, Mr. Rodriguez will have to be elected leader. He will want to position himself more as a candidate accustomed to debating, governing and winning.
And so, as the one who can rebuild a party that has hit rock bottom and is still struggling to recover.
One thing is certain: he is taking a personal risk. His federal riding, Honoré-Mercier, is one of the very few Liberal strongholds that still stands.
His departure would hurt Justin Trudeau. It will cause a ministerial adjustment or reshuffle. Small consolation, it will give Mr. Trudeau a pretext to show new faces. But it is above all further proof that the Reds’ ship is taking on water.
Mr. Rodriguez will not be able to maintain the vagueness for long. As a lieutenant in Quebec, he is in frequent contact with the Legault government, and he cannot be both an ally and a rival.
The rumor about his candidacy seems to have come out earlier than he wanted. It destabilizes him, but it could also help him. Because the other potential candidates are getting active and are already accumulating support. And the race is now about to change gear.