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Bribing voters

Whether vote-buying is against the law comes down to a question of whether the purchase is retail or wholesale.

It's illegal to buy votes one at a time, in secret, with small sums of money.

But it's OK to try to buy them by the hundreds, in full view, using millions in public funds.

And in this pre-election year in Quebec, the going rate for a seat in the National Assembly has reached $25 million.

That's the total value of a government aid package Premier Bernard Landry offered to a meat-packing company to build a pig slaughterhouse in the village of Notre-Dame-du-Lac east of Quebec City.

The slaughterhouse was to replace one in the village that was destroyed by fire last May. The slaughterhouse was the village's major employer, providing 450 jobs.

The government made the last-minute offer so that the company, Viandes du Breton, would not go through with plans to rebuild elsewhere.

And where do you think the company was planning on rebuilding? Surely outside the province, right? After all, why else would the government offer it about $25 million to try to get it to re-build in the same village?

Actually, the company had no intention of moving out of Quebec. In fact, it wasn't even leaving the region. It intended to rebuild in the city of Rivière-du-Loup, which isn't very far from Notre-Dame-du-Lac.

But the government's offer was only good if the company rebuilt in Notre-Dame-du-Lac.

Why? Well, economically speaking, while the jobs provided by the slaughterhouse would no doubt benefit Rivière-du-Loup, they would mean nothing less than the survival of Notre-Dame-du-Lac.

The village is in Kamouraska-Témiscouata riding, a scenic but impoverished area that rises from the south shore of the St. Lawrence to the New Brunswick border. The riding has been hit hard by the softwood lumber dispute with the United States.

But electoral considerations were probably another factor in the government's offer.

Rivière-du-Loup happens to be represented in the National Assembly by Mario Dumont, the most popular politician in the province right now.

He's held the riding for two terms and in the 1998 general elections, was re-elected with a comfortable plurality of 4,589 votes, or 20 per cent of the valid votes cast.

Even if the government was seen helping du Breton rebuild in Rivière-du-Loup, it probably wouldn't be enough for the Parti Québécois to unseat Dumont.

But Kamouraska-Témiscouata looks more like a winnable riding for the PQ. In the last general election, it lost the riding to rookie Liberal candidate Claude Béchard by only 110 votes. Notre-Dame-du-Lac itself went Liberal by 74 votes.

So politically, as well as economically, the government would have got more bang for our buck by buying the gratitude of 450 workers and the other eligible voters in their families in the vicinity of Notre-Dame-du-Lac.

Unfortunately for the PQ, the company apparently has decided to turn down the offer and go ahead with its plans to move to Rivière-du-Loup.

But if trying to buy votes with public funds doesn't always work, the PQ has other ways of trying to win over the sparsely populated rural regions that will decide the next election.

Yesterday, it floated a trial balloon concerning the promised creation of a House of the Regions, a new, elected, upper house in the legislature. This promises the rural regions, which are already over-represented in the Assembly relative to the more densely populated urban centres, even more influence in the legislature.

The government would also promise decentralization to give regional administrations more power. The PQ makes no secret that it hopes this would teach local politicians that there isn't enough money for them because too much of it goes to Ottawa. And it's practically daring the opposition parties to come out against giving more power to the regions.

- Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist, based in Montreal. His E-mail address is dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca