The infatuation with Super Mario

OTTAWA - We have been noticed in Quebec. This is always amusing.

Regular readers of this newspaper (Hi, Mr. Asper) will recall that on Monday Mario Dumont, the wee leader of Quebec's upstart Action Démocratique party, gave a big speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto. As the National Post reported at Proustian length on Tuesday, Mr. Dumont stood in front of a big Canadian flag to proclaim his affection for flat taxes, private health care, capitalism and a smaller state.

He also declared that a secession referendum and wholesale constitutional change are not "on the radar screen" of his party, which pollsters give the best chance of forming Quebec's next government.

Well. Here at the Post, we are also more fond of capitalism than secession. So our editor ran Mr. Dumont's column off Page 1 and our editorialists announced their hope that Mr. Dumont be able to take his ideas to government. My friend Don Martin, who splits his time between the Calgary Herald and this paper, called Mr. Dumont "the next premier of Alberta East."

Over at The Globe, Margaret Wente wrote some nice things, too. The Star's editorial took another view, as you might expect. But that paper was marginally less upset with Mr. Dumont's conservatism than with reasonable suspicion about whether he's really as O Canada as all that, since he campaigned with Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau during the unpleasantness of 1995.

So that's the back story. You would not believe how shocked our colleagues in Montreal and Quebec City are at Mr. Dumont's warm Toronto welcome. The theme of their coverage of our coverage is that any friend of English Canada is no friend of Quebec. It will be interesting to see whether this charge sticks. I'm betting it won't.

Serge Chapleau, the wonderful La Presse cartoonist, drew Mr. Dumont strapped to a giant maple leaf. Mr. Chapleau is more given to subtlety than Garnotte, his counterpart at Le Devoir. Garnotte decked Mr. Dumont out in more British kitsch gear than Austin Powers, because as Le Devoir's elite readers understand, Toronto is a royalist outport of Her Majesty's empire.

So here's Mario in a kilt and bowler hat, carrying a brolly, drinking tea, while a bulldog looks on with love in its eyes. "Next time I'll play them God Save the Queen on a bagpipe," Mr. Dumont tells himself. I say, you've got to love the subtle humour of those French chaps, what. Pip pip.

That's just the cartoonists. Of course the serious commentary was more adult. Of course. "On his knees before English Canada," Michel Venne wrote in Le Devoir. "On his knees before finance."

That line came in a column that made a very good point -- that PQ voters and union members who are getting ready to vote en masse for the ADQ had better realize Mr. Dumont is a very conservative politician. The question is how many voters see that as a fault, in a province whose voters self-identify in poll after poll as the most overtaxed in Canada.

As for the on-his-knees stuff, I suppose there's little one can do any more except sigh. Michel won't believe it, but this is something we Anglos actually tell one another even when there's no francophone around to dominate: Quebec is never more thoroughly on its knees than when half its population is estranged from the other half because its leaders have put aside the serious work of serious societies to engage in another knock-down, drag-out debate over sovereignty-partnership-confederal-union-national-affirmation-reconfederation-blah-de-frickin-blah. I lived in Montreal between the death of Meech and the 1995 referendum, when support for sovereignty was nice and high and everyone had referendums on their radar. To be polite, that shelled-out husk of a city wasn't exactly the workers' paradise.

Onward. Bernard Landry, Quebec's Premier, actually got into the act. "The Toronto press puts [Mr. Dumont] farther to the right than Mike Harris and Ralph Klein. The Quebec population must be made aware of these things." I know Don Martin will be tickled to learn he has joined the Toronto press. But Mr. Landry's comment is to be expected: The Parti Québécois is trying to do to Mr. Dumont what it did to Jean Charest in 1998, portray him as the puppet of the English.

I don't actually believe my Quebec colleagues are doing the same, consciously. I think they're simply making a bad guess. Not all of them. Pay close attention to Michel C. Auger in Le Journal de Montréal. "With friends like that" -- he means us -- "you risk having a little less success in Quebec."

What's unremarkable is that Michel made that prediction. What makes me think he's a smart cookie is that he hedges his bet. He's not saying Mr. Dumont is doomed because he's a lickspittle sycophant of the "Toronto press." He's saying he could be.

But Mr. Dumont has been one surprise after another already this year. It may be that Quebecers are eager to turn the page, not only on neverendums, but on constitutional squabbling, obtuse statism and the lamentable paranoia that equates an adult relationship among Canadians with grovelling.

It's true that the infatuation with Super Mario reached comical heights in our pages this week. The Star has a point: Mr. Dumont is a ball who has bounced in several directions on constitutional matters.

But the growing enthusiasm about Mr. Dumont is the opposite of the only-he-can-save-us hysteria that propelled Mr. Charest, quite against his will, to Quebec City. Sending Mr. Charest as a saviour amounted to a hope that he would teach Quebecers a lesson. Doomed from the start. Recognizing Mr. Dumont as a faithful student of his province's public opinion amounts to a leap of faith in Quebecers themselves. Call it a beau risque.

Quebecers may be coming to realize, much more clearly than their betters in the hometown papers, that the enemy is not the bowler-hatted capitalists of Bay Street, but defeatism and finger-pointing. Stranger things have happened. These days, in Quebec, they seem to be happening all the time.

pwells@nationalpost.com