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«« PQ Premier Bernard Landry, who is rarely at a loss for words, admits to being
"perplexed" by the apparent rise in popularity of Mario Dumont's Action
Démocratique du Québec. Poll results published last weekend suggest that the ADQ now is the most
popular of the three parties represented in the National Assembly, while
Landry's Parti Québécois has dropped into third place, with the support of only
23 per cent of the voters. How bad is that? The PQ happened to get exactly that share of the over-all
vote in the 1970 general election and won only seven seats in the Assembly,
which then had 108. It must be galling to Landry, who finally became premier at 64 after being in
and out of government in senior posts for a quarter-century, that Quebecers
apparently prefer to have running their government a 32-year-old who has never
been a cabinet minister or run anything bigger than what until recently was his
own one-man show. But it's obvious that Landry has no explanation for the sudden rise of the
ADQ and his party's fall. It's also obvious he has no idea what to do about it,
any more than he has a plan for achieving sovereignty. "Things that inflate too fast in politics can deflate as quickly," he says
hopefully of the ADQ's 36-per-cent support in the SOM poll conducted May 17-22
for La Presse and Quebec City's Le Soleil. But he doesn't seem to know what pin he might use to prick the ADQ's
balloon. He jabs away with the fact that 100,000 jobs were created in Quebec in only
the first four months of the year, an exceptional economic performance, the best
of any province; after all, he knows that Quebec governments are usually
re-elected after the unemployment rate has gone down. But the voters don't seem to credit his government with the current relative
prosperity. Another historical trend, that Quebec governments don't get a third
term, seems to be prevailing, even though, unlike the two previous two-term
governments, Landry's government has not had to go through a recession in its
second term. He and his MNAs say the government has to explain itself better and listen
more to the voters. But they've been saying those things for more than six
months now. Either the government isn't doing what it keeps saying it has to do,
or it isn't working. In historical terms, the present government is not an especially old one;
it's been only 42 months since the last general election, which is seven months
less than the average interval between general elections since 1970. But already this government seems to be on its deathbed, helplessly awaiting
the inevitable when it can no longer put off the election. It has gone beyond
being a lame duck to become a Francisco Franco of governments, after the Spanish
dictator whose deathwatch seemed to last an eternity. As with the daily
bulletins on Franco's condition, all that can be said of the PQ government is
that it is still alive. It has no legislative agenda to speak of; even Jean-Pierre Charbonneau's
half-baked schemes of political "reform" seem to have been abandoned, for the
most part. One wonders how the Assembly will fill its sitting time if the
government puts off the election until next year. And it appears not to have any
great plans for the future. In recent months, it has given the impression that if it has any purpose for
remaining in power, it is to enrich the premier's friends by allowing them to
trade on their access to him by inserting themselves as otherwise superfluous
lobbyists. Trying to explain away the ADQ's apparent popularity on the weekend, the
vice-president of the PQ, Marie Malavoy, said that all it really means is that
the voters want change. It's not a sign of health in a two-term government when members of the
governing party begin to speak of a desire for change. Often, the next step is
for them to start saying that the head of government "has a decision to make,"
the decision being to create at least an appearance of change by stepping aside
in favour of a new leader. Usually, it doesn't work, for the simple reason that
it's hard for a second-term government to represent change. - Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist, based in
Montreal. His E-mail address is dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca. |