Pierre Poilievre is fluently bilingual and has a French last name. But that doesn't mean he impresses Quebecers. Chantal Hebert writes:
More than six months after his election as Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre has yet to meet Quebec Premier François Legault one on one.
That stands in stark contrast with his two immediate predecessors. Notwithstanding the pandemic, Erin O’Toole and Legault met face-to-face less than a month after the former became leader in August 2020.
Andrew Scheer showed up for a meeting with the premier two short weeks after the CAQ was first elected to government in 2018.
By the time Poilievre and Legault get around to a sit-down meeting, they will have a lot less to talk about than they would have back in September.
For by now, there is little left of the Quebec agenda that earned O’Toole the premier’s implicit endorsement in the last election.
Since Stephen Harper took over the party, the Conservatives have become a Western party and Quebec has become an annoyance. It's clear that Poilievre sees Quebec that way:
Over the course of the leadership campaign, Poilievre renounced the party’s hands-off position on Quebec’s contentious securalism law. And on health-care funding, he would stick to the terms the prime minister set out over his recent round of negotiations with the provinces.
Unlike Poilievre, Trudeau has been trying to mend fences:
The loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement has been plugged, with Roxham Road no longer being used as the main entry point for irregular migration from the United States to Canada.
In an unlikely development, the two governments have reconciled their respective language legislation, with Legault now fully behind Trudeau’s rewritten Official Languages Act.
After years of provincial lobbying, the federal government added Quebec shipyard Chantier Davie as the third shipyard in its multibillion-dollar ship procurement plan. At the same time, the federal budget and its plan for a green economy stands to translate into generous tax breaks for Hydro Quebec.
Last month, Trudeau endorsed Legault’s pick for the role of second in command of L’organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Former Bloc MP Caroline St-Hilaire was defeated as a CAQ star candidate in last fall’s Quebec election.
The Conservatives don't understand Quebec -- and they have no desire to understand the province. That's one of the reasons the party will continue to lose elections.
Image: Le Devoir
