Looking back on the defeated Coalition Avenir Québec government’s eight years in office, it might be fair to say that they got at least one thing right.
That was towards the beginning of the CAQ’s first mandate in 2018, when newly-elected Premier François Legault decided to make good on a longstanding if not necessarily very consequential promise.
For years, there had been complaints that provincial legislation setting out the complex rules for the way taxes for school boards were collected needed to be fixed because of the uneven distribution of the fiscal burden across the province’s regions.
Those fortunate enough when they open their annual school tax bill to see they are paying a considerably more reasonable sum now for the province’s public schools have the Legault government to thank.
It was overdue. But as far as we are concerned, that is one of the few things this outgoing government did of any real consequence or worth.
After that, everything they did arguably became no better than posturing – mimicking the other parties’ stances – posing, for example, as supporters of federalism one minute, while enacting policies conceived to be in line with ideas more properly belonging to the Parti Québécois.
Something that might shed some light on the roots of the CAQ’s demise last Monday is the manner by which the party was originally conceived by one of its two co-founders, François Legault, more than 15 years ago.
Around that time, Legault (who had a well-established reputation as the entrepreneurial co-founder of Air Transat) toured Quebec, using focus groups and other market research tools he learned about in business.
He was trying to determine whether a quantifiable justification could be found among the province’s voters for the establishment of a new political entity offering a “third way” alternative to the PQ’s uncompromising separatism and the PLQ’s official federalist stance.
Presumably, when Legault crunched the numbers and digested the feedback, he understood there was room for a “coalition” bringing together otherwise disparate ideologies – though perhaps he mistakenly believed this would be the equivalent of a political party.
Hence, if the Coalition Avenir Québec seriously lacked one thing, it was perhaps the sense of “spirit” and tradition that animate well-established political parties and which have kept the PQ and the PLQ alive for generations in spite of the adversity they’ve faced.
On the other hand, what the CAQ lacked in idealistic spirit it made up for in the kind of opportunism that may drive its remaining members to seek refuge within the four political parties that now hold seats in the National Assembly, or the smorgasbord of smaller ones registered with the Quebec Director General of Elections.
This is not to completely dismiss the valuable and perhaps even historic role the Coalition Avenir Québec played over the last eight years. It’s a card they might have used more forcefully in this election (if not perhaps for the objections of sovereignists among their members).
For the fact is that, if not for the CAQ’s ambiguous stance on federalism and sovereignty, the PQ might have had a great deal more than seven seats in the last National Assembly session (three in 2022, four more in by-elections) – although a tide favoring the PQ finally broke loose in this election.
And while some of the CAQ’s policies (ban on religious symbols, stricter language laws, hardline immigration quotas) outraged those opposing them, they may prove to have been relatively light in comparison to what the new PQ government has in mind given its self-image as the most strident of guardians for Quebec’s language and culture.
As illustrated by PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s statements which he couldn’t resist including in his election night victory speech, separatism remains the PQ’s obsession and will never be altogether out of the Premier-elect’s thoughts and words.
As for the CAQ’s gaffes over the course of two terms, they were so numerous it’s impossible to list them all here. Perhaps the most glaring – and costly – were the Northvolt fiasco, costing Quebec a $270 million investment in the bankrupt battery venture – and the SAAQClic scandal, involving the mismanaged digital transformation and cost overrun at the province’s auto insurance board.
The project centered around SAAQclic, designed to centralize and automate services like driver’s licence renewals, driving tests and vehicle registrations. When the platform launched in February 2023, it suffered from severe technical glitches, system crashes, and identity authentication barriers. This forced thousands of frustrated drivers across Quebec to wait in long lines outside SAAQ branches in the winter cold.
Initially estimated to cost around $500 million to $638 million, the total cost ballooned by over $500 million, ultimately topping out at roughly $1.1 billion.
Although a high-profile public inquiry concluded that top SAAQ officials deliberately lied and provided deceptive information to the CAQ government to conceal spiralling costs and a lack of testing, it was yet another telling sign of the CAQ’s growing reputation for incompetence, which it could not shake off.
And then there is the state of Quebec’s ailing public health sector, which the CAQ (with characteristic shortsightedness) had hoped to remedy with a restructuring which essentially amounted to applying a new label to this massive entity and renaming it Santé Québec.
All things considered, Quebec’s voters probably had these and other issues on their minds on October 5 when they failed to accord the former Coalition Avenir Québec government even a single seat in the 44th Quebec Legislature.
– Martin C. Barry, Newsfirst Multimedia –
