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Dumont's polish masks a fickle `partner'

Éditorial - It's probably for the best that Mario Dumont didn't take questions yesterday when he spoke to The Canadian Club in Toronto. Somebody in the crisp Bay Street luncheon crowd might have asked how busting up the country would be good for business.

For that's just what Quebec's freshest, highest-flying political whiz kid tried to do in the dark days of the 1995 referendum.

Dumont put on a polished performance yesterday, promising a healthier political and economic partnership if he's elected premier.

But don't be fooled — behind his boyish image is a man who clearly backs Quebec separation, supports two-tier health care, and wants to undercut day care and a fair tax system.

But in 1995 he was part of a troika, along with Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, who aimed to take Quebec out of Canada. The federalists won, by a thin 1 per cent margin.

And even as his side lost, Dumont declared, "Canada exists only on paper" and was finished as a country.

That Dumont drew applause in Toronto for saying he's now prepared to lead Quebecers into a profitable new relationship with "our Canadian partners," was a depressing reminder of how little Canadians have come to expect from Quebec politicians.

He sounded like former premier Robert Bourassa, who preached an arid "profitable federalism" devoid of any emotional ties to the nation.

Dumont says his tiny Action démocratique du Québec party is too busy "building up (Quebec's) strength" to want to fiddle with constitutional reform, much less risk another losing referendum. What happens after that strength is built up, he didn't say.

This slipperiness on Canada may help explain why commitment-shy Quebecers are parking their sympathies with Dumont's party at least for now, rather than with Premier Bernard Landry's separation-obsessed Parti Québécois, or Jean Charest's federalist Liberals. The ADQ is a mirror that faithfully reflects back whatever the voter wants to see, on the national issue at least.

On other matters — health care, taxes and day care — Dumont makes Mike Harris look like a wild-eyed socialist.

Dumont says it's all right for people who can afford it to jump the health-care queue. Quebecers should be allowed to "pay extra to help our mother get a faster hip replacement," he said.

He'd also shelve Quebec's progressive tax policy in favour of a neo-conservative "flat tax" that would hit wealthy and needy equally. That, too, is calculated to please people in the higher income brackets.

And he'd end Quebec's popular $5-a-day universal day-care program that has been a great help to many low-income wage earners.

It is a measure of Quebecers' dissatisfaction with the older parties that the voters seem prepared to overlook this backward-looking program.

Long a one-man band from rural Rivière-du-Loup, Dumont has now managed to capture four more seats in Quebec's 125-seat National Assembly. But it is his 40 per cent standing in the polls that scares the other parties. The Toronto speech was Dumont's first bid to polish his national image, among those with short memories.

But his opportunistic embrace of the Canadian union is unpersuasive.

If separation ever becomes popular again in Quebec, it's hard to imagine Dumont mounting the barricades to defend his business partner.