Marois’s campaign goes from bad to catastrophic
Embattled PQ leader needs a miracle to turn this around
Nocampaign is over until it is, in fact, over. But we can say this much: Pauline Marois personally has had a catastrophic few weeks, from which she will find it difficult to recover. She needs to win a majority next Monday to avoid the guillotine that awaits all Parti Québécois leaders who disappoint their brothers and sisters in the movement. Such a victory now seems unlikely.
Those seeking a ray of light in the PQ campaign, at any point in its tortuous, shambolic meanderings since March 5, will be hard-pressed to find one. At every turn, Marois and her team have staggered over their own feet and plunged blades into their own backs. Small wonder the faces were so downcast behind the leader early Tuesday as she appeared on RDI to face the Quebec political corruption scandal du jour — this time that her husband, Claude Blanchet, had broken the PQ’s own rules in 2007 in raising $25,000 in combined donations to her leadership bid, from an anonymous Quebec businessman, in exchange for “privileged access” to the leader.
The report, from Radio Canada’s Alain Gravel, has been categorically denied by both Marois and Blanchet. But the damage, that of sullying the PQ’s claim to reformist virtue that sets it on a higher moral plane than the scandal-plagued Liberals, is done. In the context of the past four weeks, it comes off as just the latest in a series of increasingly desperate, backfired PQ gambits to turn the tide.
There has not been just one miscalculation here but four, each piled upon the other in a down-spiralling cascade.
The first was for Marois and her team to assume it was a given they were separatists — they being leaders of a party founded for the sole purpose of effecting Quebec’s separation from Canada — and that it was therefore no big thing for them to chat offhandedly, in a blue-sky kind of way, about said separation. Quebecers, quietly going about their business, responded with an incredulous intake of breath. This is the pitfall of politicians who believe in a grand unattained dream, and further that this dream puts him or her on the side of the angels. They really can’t help but proselytize for their beloved idea, whether that makes tactical sense or not.
Second mistake: The PQ brain trust assumed that, because polls have consistently shown a majority of Quebecers favour a secular charter — one that would assert gender equality, reinforce common pluralistic values and reiterate the secular character of the state — their peculiarly restrictive, draconian and jingoistic ex- pression of this idea would pass muster. Their proposed charter is so extreme that, in seeking to make it the focus rather than separation, they merely flushed the cranks in their midst out into the open.
Exhibit A: Janette Bertrand, an 89-year-old Quebec feminist, ranting at a news conference Sunday about the mortal peril to Quebec coed swimming programs posed by fictitious wealthy McGill University students who happen to be, we can only assume, Wahhabi Islamic extremists.
That such grotesque demagogy should find its way into a major political campaign in Canada in 2014 is surreal. That the PQ is midwifing it comes at an immediate cost, simply because there is a party in the wings, Québec solidaire, with a likable and articulate leader, Françoise David, poised to scoop up left-of-centre refugees from a party René Lévesque himself would no longer recognize.
The third miscalculation: With the separatist argument backfiring badly and the charter question fraught with little bomblets, integrity and ethics were deemed to be a fallow field. In the second televised debate last Thursday, Marois — energetically assisted at times by Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault, who came with steel-toed boots — went all guns blazing at Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard for his having placed money in a tax-sheltered bank account in Jersey, years ago, while working as a surgeon in Saudi Arabia. There is no evidence Couillard did anything unusual, illegal or wrong; but the suggestion was that he was unpatriotic, and — being a Liberal — a bit shady.
All of that has now backfired spectacularly with the Gravel report, as Marois herself fends off allegations of impropriety far more serious than anything she has levelled thus far at Couillard.
Finally, the PQ leader — who chose this campaign and its timing — appears to have badly failed in taking the measure of her opponents. Couillard was strong in the first debate, weaker in the second, but still held his own; David has been engaging throughout, despite her patently absurd program; and Legault in debate has been an implacable executioner, hammering Marois and Couillard alike, torching the ground beneath both their feet. The result has been that, far from looking commanding and impervious, in keeping with her chosen moniker, “La dame de béton,” Marois has often looked weak.
There is precious little time now for her to turn this around; she needs an act of God.