The floods, Bombardier and the aloofness of Philippe Couillard

“It’s as if he should always be in crisis,” said TVA political commentator Luc Lavoie, facetiously, as he praised Premier Philippe Couillard for meeting with flood victims on Monday.

Lavoie might have tempered his praise if he saw a quote buried deep in a story in the next day’s La Presse.

“What’s happening now, we saw it coming six or seven weeks ago,” said Jean-Aubry Morin, a spokesperson for the joint Canada-United States body that regulates water flow from Lake Ontario down the St. Lawrence River into Quebec.

If so, then there was time for other public officials and private citizens, had they been alerted, to take precautions against the flooding.

As for Couillard’s meeting with disaster victims, it’s something all politicians are expected to do, at the risk of appearing to use the victims as extras in photo ops. The National Assembly cancelled its Tuesday sitting so its members could do just that.

But Lavoie had a point about Couillard in particular: it’s in the aftermath of tragedy, such as the Quebec City mosque shootings in January, or in a crisis, such as the flooding, that as premier, Couillard has been at his best.

That’s when what Lavoie called Couillard’s usual cerebral, even “cold” image gives way to humanity, empathy and compassion.

Couillard’s apparent aloofness is not only emotional. He is seldom seen on television, as he was on Monday with the flood victims, in the company of “ordinary” Quebecers — that is, those who are neither among the dwindling membership of his party nor, especially, businessmen.

The latter’s omnipresence makes the Quebec Liberal Party look like the rich man’s party. Since the 1960s, the QLP has been known as the party of the economy, as well as social reform. But under first Jean Charest and now Couillard, it has shifted to the right, and become the party of money.

And money is the root of the present Liberal government’s major political problems. Couillard’s government is dogged by allegations arising from Charest’s conversion of the QLP into a fundraising machine, and by the unpopularity of its own austerity measures to appease the bondrating agencies.

Whatever goodwill Couillard earned by meeting with the flood victims, he may have squandered only a couple of days later, when he appeared to side with the fat cats against public opinion, in the Bombardier affair.

In a Léger poll after Bombardier Inc. appeared to reward senior executives with big bonuses after obtaining a billion-dollar bailout from Couillard’s government while laying off thousands of workers, Quebecers expressed near-unanimous outrage.

In other circumstances, Couillard has not shied away from using his office as what Theodore Roosevelt called a “bully pulpit” (“bully” meaning “very good”).

During the recent Andrew Potter affair, Le Devoir quoted the premier suggesting that Potter could not remain in his administrative post at McGill University, which receives provincial funding, after Potter wrote a muchcriticized article on Quebec in Maclean’s magazine.

And around the same time, a complaint from the premier’s office resulted in a cartoon disparaging Couillard being pulled from a weekly newspaper’s website.

Instead of calling the weekly’s editor responsible for its content, the premier’s representative went over her head to the paper’s owner, Transcontinental Inc., which happened to be seeking a change in proposed legislation affecting its interests.

Yet in the case of Bombardier, Couillard has meekly bowed down before that company’s breathtaking arrogance, refusing to criticize it even after several large institutional investors, including the government’s Caisse de dépôt pension fund, did so.

Instead, Couillard admonished Quebecers on Wednesday that they should “continue to love and support this great enterprise from here,” as though they should be grateful to Bombardier for taking their money.

On Thursday, Couillard again met with flood victims, this time in the Gatineau area. But first, he and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inspected affected areas, from an armed forces helicopter, above it all.