Ten years ago this month, François Legault altered the course of Quebec – and, by definition, Canadian – history in ways that almost no one understood at the time.
With the 2011 launch of his Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec, or Coalition for Quebec’s Future, the former Parti Québécois cabinet minister aimed to knock the “national question” off the political agenda after four decades of increasingly sterile debates over sovereignty. His crew of disaffected separatists and soft federalists sought to put bread-and-butter issues above existential ones and “renovate” the Quebec state for the 21st century.
Though the “coalition” started out as a movement, rather than a political party, no one doubted then that Mr. Legault’s ultimate objective was the premier’s office. He had twice tested the waters for a PQ leadership run, in 2005 and 2007, to no avail. His sovereigntist colleagues considered him uncharismatic, insufficiently orthodox and oddly unpolished.
As a successful entrepreneur and co-founder of Air Transat, Mr. Legault acted as any ambitious corporate executive repeatedly passed over for the top job might: He set up his own shop. Mr. Legault formally registered his new political party – the name shortened to the snappier Coalition Avenir Québec – in late 2011. Within weeks, the CAQ had absorbed the fledgling Action Démocratique du Québec and attracted high-profile candidates.
The moment seemed ripe for a “change” election. Polls showed Quebeckers had grown weary of the four-decadees-long political duopoly that had seen the PQ and Quebec Liberal Party leverage the federalist-sovereignty dichotomy in order to polarize the electorate. The governing Liberals, under then-premier Jean Charest, were mired in a party-financing scandal. And the PQ was reeling from an internal schism that had shaken the leadership of Pauline Marois.
For reasons that had much to do with Quebec’s first-past-the-post electoral system, it would take a couple more elections for Mr. Legault’s CAQ to break through. But when it did, winning a majority in 2018, everything changed.
Not, mind you, in the way Mr. Legault had promised when he had created the CAQ seven years earlier. There has been no laser focus on improving Quebec’s economic competitiveness, or overhauling the province’s tax system. The CAQ inherited huge budget surpluses, but has only tinkered with taxes, and may even end up raising them to deal with renewed deficits.
Mr. Legault’s government did abolish school boards, but there has been no revolution in public or postsecondary education. The CAQ has undertaken even fewer reforms in the health care sector. Instead, it has focused on identity politics – implementing a ban on conspicuous religious symbols for some public-sector employees, and promising to protect French – rather than undertaking a wholesale “renovation” of the Quebec state. The latter is as big as ever.
The real revolution – or rather, counter-revolution – undertaken by Mr. Legault is a function of his leadership style. The Premier regularly gets compared to Union Nationale strongman Maurice Duplessis, who ran Quebec as a personal fief in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Duplessis, Mr. Legault is a strong nationalist, and possibly even a separatist, but one who seems perfectly content to run Quebec as a province so long as Ottawa leaves him alone. But he is not as ruthless as was Mr. Duplessis, and he is admired, rather than feared, by his own constituents.
The pandemic has enabled Mr. Legault to indulge his paternalistic instincts to an extent no other modern-day Canadian politician could ever get away with. His ordering of an 8 p.m. curfew – without offering a shred of empirical evidence to support the move – was met with almost no resistance among Quebeckers. The Father Knows Best parallels would be quaint if they were not so disturbing. But Quebeckers seem to trust his judgment unquestioningly.
Mr. Legault’s simple language and folksy demeanour – he makes Ontario Premier Doug Ford sound like Plato – should not fool anyone. He is a hyperstrategic control freak. His cabinet ministers are obedient to a fault and appropriately self-effacing. Mr. Legault switched health ministers after the first wave of the pandemic because the first one did not smile enough. Only two women have major portfolios, which says a lot about Mr. Legault’s personal priorities.
The “coalition” Mr. Legault founded a decade ago has proved to be anything but that. The CAQ is a one-man-show that may not outlast its creator and star. The latter has a decidedly retro aura about him. He may yet even roll back history. He has most certainly changed it.
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Konrad Yakabuski