BY L. IAN MACDONALD MONTREAL — It’s early days in the Quebec election campaign, but there’s no doubt that Jean Charest won the first week.
Indeed, he won the last two weeks before the campaign started, playing the incumbent card with a series of government announcements that played well in the regions, while playing statesman at the Council of the Federation and at the Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Premiers. Then, the night before dropping the writ, he drew more than 1,000 people to his nomination meeting in Sherbrooke.
So Charest had the appearance of momentum going into the campaign, and has largely maintained it in the week since. He had a clean launch, and the media frame was about his message of continuity as opposed to chaos, democracy or a street mob.
Charest also had a good couple of days on the economy, promising to create 250,000 jobs and reduce unemployment to 6 per cent over the next mandate.
Even the potentially problematic issue of Lowe’s bidding on RONA Inc. was quickly taken off the table last Tuesday when the Liberals sent out Finance Minister Raymond Bachand to say the hardware giant was a strategic asset for Quebec. At the same time, the Caisse de dépôt et placement was increasing its stake as the company’s largest shareholder to 14.3 per cent, and putting out a statement about “the importance of the economic benefits of RONA’s head office in Quebec.”
While this is highly debatable, it was very smart politics. At his campaign launch the next day, Charest didn’t get a single question about the proposed takeover. This was more than a pivot, it was a pre-emptive takeout.
For her part, Pauline Marois spent the opening days of the campaign mostly on the defensive. Any time the Parti Québécois has to explain itself on sovereignty and referendums, that’s a good day for the Liberals.
Then she went for a ride on the Montreal métro accompanied by star candidate Léo Bureau-Blouin, the former student leader. So the PQ campaign created a photo-op reminding voters that striking students disrupted the Montreal subway last spring. Brilliant.
Then Charest’s PQ opponent in Sherbrooke, Serge Cardin, made headlines when he gave an interview saying Quebecers weren’t ready for a woman as premier.
The PQ and the Coalition Avenir Québec are also in a struggle for ownership of the opposition ballot question of change and corruption.
This was quite apparent on Sunday when the PQ’s launch of star candidate Jean-François Lisée was trumped by the CAQ’s recruitment of Jacques Duchesneau, introduced by leader François Legault as the Eliot Ness of Quebec.
But Duchesneau has a reputation as a loose cannon, and the very next day he gave a radio interview in which he said he would be appointing the anti-corruption ministers in a CAQ cabinet. This is not how our constitutional convention works. Legault immediately rebuked his star recruit, saying there would be “only one boss,” and posting on his Twitter feed that he had “experience managing big egos.”
Charest had a field day with this, saying: “If I understand it correctly, François Legault will run the Twitter account and organize cocktail fundraisers, while Jacques Duchesneau will run the rest of the government.” Marois also pounced, accusing the CAQ of “improvisation” and calling them “amateurish.” In other words, not ready to govern.
In the space of 24 hours, Duchesneau went from being a crusader against corruption to the object of ridicule. Still, the CAQ appears to have the upper hand against the PQ on ownership of the corruption theme. And corruption has been the main headline for several days in a row, which is not the media frame the Liberals want.
However, it will be helpful to Charest if the opposition vote splits, while his own is coalescing around the only clear federalist choice on the ballot. If CAQ grows a few points at the expense of the PQ, the Liberals will have no problem with that. And there’s no doubt that every vote for Amir Khadir and Québec solidaire comes out of Pauline’s purse. The QS slogan, “debout” (“rise up”) is a leftist-separatist call to arms. The QS vote, which polled near double digits before the start of the campaign, is concentrated in the old PQ heartland of east-end Montreal.
In any August campaign, the level of voter engagement is bound to be low. There’s a sense that Quebecers won’t be tuning in until the debates, the week after next. At this point, Quebec voters are more interested in watching the Olympics. As far as that goes, they’re more taken with RONA’s brilliant Olympic relay ad than they are concerned with who owns the hardware chain.
lianmacdonald@gmail.com