Shortly after his election, Prime Minister François Legault warned his team against “the temptation of arrogance”. He was quite right, the previous government had been largely beaten by its arrogance in imposing austerity which was going to weaken the education and health networks to the extreme.
Posted on March 20
But as the last session of the National Assembly begins before the October 3 elections, the Legault government is locking itself into exactly the same temptations as its predecessor.
We have seen several examples of this this week. First, the question of electricity rates and the mechanism – or, rather, the absence of a mechanism – for setting Hydro-Québec rates provided for in Bill 34, adopted under the gag order, despite the urgently absent. A practice that smacks of a certain arrogance and which was to become a trademark of the CAQ.
At the time, everyone and his mother had urged the government to back down on its intention to link Hydro rate hikes to inflation. In a rare gesture, four former energy ministers, across partisan divisions, had signed a letter urging the government to withdraw its project.
The opposition parties, in particular, had warned the government: even if inflation had been relatively low and stable for three decades, nothing prevented an unforeseen event from changing everything.
At the time, opposition MPs pointed to the possibility of an unforeseeable event, such as a war in the Middle East, which would have sent fuel prices skyrocketing. On the side of the government, we had laughed at so much pessimism. Well, they will be in the wrong place, but that’s exactly what we are currently experiencing.
Faced with the likelihood that Hydro’s next rate hike will be more than 5% – the highest in more than three decades – Mr. Legault says, essentially, to trust him and that he will fix it.
We can already see a check looming, sent to all families by their good Prime Minister to protect them against Hydro rate hikes. A paternalistic and regal gesture that comes from an assumed arrogance: your government will correct the perverse effects of a bad law with a nice check.
Another example: the law that would put an end to the health emergency. First, let’s establish one thing: there is no need for a law for that, it is enough to let this exceptional regime expire, which must be renewed every 10 days, which the government has done 103 times since the start of the pandemic.
Quebec is the only Canadian province to still use special powers and most of the other provinces gave them up months ago.
But the government wants to keep certain special powers until December 31 in case the health situation becomes worrying again. After all, we see what is happening in China and some countries in Europe, which shows that a sixth wave of COVID-19 is still possible.
And this is where the government’s explanations become incomprehensible. We no longer want measures that must be imposed, such as wearing a mask, “population” measures, in the jargon of public health. But we want to keep powers because a new wave of COVID-19 remains possible. Except that we can only return to population measures by invoking the state of health emergency again.
When the explanations are so incomprehensible, we leave room for all the conjectures.
Including that the government has become so accustomed to governing by fiat — with $17 billion in OTC contracts during the pandemic — that it is keen to retain as much power as possible, at least until an election.
There is also the REM de l’Est file, where the government has completely adopted the arrogant attitude of “take it or leave it” like the promoter of the project, CDPQ Infra.
The reality is that the project no longer has, to use the Prime Minister’s words in another file, “social acceptability”. But it is electorally convenient. That way, we can promise a $10 billion transportation project in Quebec City, the third link, and in Montreal, the REM. A kind of beautiful symmetry of promises that we can let go after the elections.
Except that, to kill the REM, you need a culprit and both the Prime Minister and the Caisse have already appointed the mayor of Montreal. Unfortunately for them, she smelled the maneuver.
After all that, we will be surprised that, in the same week, Mr. Legault ordered the voters of Marie-Victorin to “vote on the right side” so that their files progress, as we did in the time of Maurice Duplessis. Or that he treated one of the best parliamentarians – according to the annual poll of The Press – from “Mother Teresa”.
Precisely the kind of arrogant attitude that an election campaign tends to amplify.