With the announcement Sunday that anti-corruption vedette Jacques Duchesneau will be its candidate in St. Jérôme riding, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec has moved one step closer toward assembling a strong core group of candidates for key cabinet positions. Overall, a credible team is taking shape.
Christian Dubé, the Italy-based director of European operations for the Quebec paper giant Cascades, was introduced July 27 by Legault as the party’s candidate in Lévis riding and as a potential finance or economic-development minister. And on July 31, the day before the election campaign officially began, Gaétan Barrette, president of the organization representing medical specialists in Quebec, was named CAQ candidate in Terrebonne riding and a potential minister of health.
Duchesneau is a former Montreal police chief whose investigative work last year as provincial anti-collusion boss, and subsequent testimony at the Charbonneau inquiry this past June, has turned him into an Eliot Ness figure in Quebec. It’s hard to underestimate the potential significance of his move into provincial politics.
Confronted with his unexpected candidacy, the Liberal Party has begun to paint Duchesneau as someone who was a partisan from the get-go, the suggestion being that his work in anti-collusion and his subsequent public comments need to be regarded accordingly. Duchesneau did seem to develop pointed anger at the Liberals as his time went on. But in politics, perceptions count for everything, and a poll published Monday in the Journal de Montréal says 70 per cent of Quebecers think the Liberal government is corrupt, while two-thirds more generally think all political parties are corrupt.
The public mood is dark and unforgiving. On the corruption issue, it couldn’t be more unfavourable to the reputation of established parties, the Parti Québécois included. That’s why Duchesneau’s candidacy is a particular blow to the PQ, and any hopes that it had of owning the corruption issue.
For most anglophones and unconditional federalists, however, there is still the inconvenient truth of Legault having been a cabinet minister in former PQ administrations. As Gazette election panelist Robert Libman, former leader of the now-dormant Equality Party, put it in a roundtable election discussion published in the Extra section of last Saturday’s Gazette: “Do you trust a leader who used to be a separatist minister?”
It’s a fair question. However, a subtle distinction needs to be drawn between Legault’s own position on sovereignty and the CAQ’s official position. Legault says he is coming back into politics for 10 years and that during those 10 years he will not fight for sovereignty. After that, he says, things might change. As for the CAQ, though, Legault says the party’s permanent position is never to fight for sovereignty.
On the language issue, the CAQ is promising to maintain restrictions on English contained in Bill 101. But it is not proposing to introduce new restrictions, such as extending Bill 101 to CEGEPs, or to companies with fewer than 50 employees — two measures that language hawks in Quebec are clamouring for. It’s not an encouraging position, but neither is it acutely discouraging, either.
Overall, Legault and his CAQ still need to provide more granularity to voters with respect to how it would govern. But there can be no doubt that with those big gets of Dubé, Barrette and especially Duchesneau, the CAQ is ending this first full Week 1 of the campaign looking like a party that deserves to be taken very seriously by voters.
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