Lisée still dogged by controversial candidate
ALMA On a day when the Parti Québécois unveiled its environmental policy, leader Jean-François Lisée was once again forced to defend past comments made by the PQ’s Mercier candidate, Michelle Blanc.
Standing in front of the Saguenay Fjord Monday morning, Lisée presented what he called the most ambitious environmental program of any of the political parties vying for election. However Lisée was peppered with questions throughout the day about Blanc amid mounting criticism about her perceived offensive comments, specifically a 2011 tweet that she “forgot to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday.”
Campaigning in Quebec City, Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard said jokes about Hitler cross the line of acceptable comment.
“There are also certain lines that should not be crossed. Making jokes around Adolf Hitler, one of the greatest murderers in the history of mankind,” crosses that line, Couillard said.
D’Arcy-McGee candidate David Birnbaum said the PQ leader should apologize.
“This is vintage Lisée: cute, cheap intellectual gymnastics when a simple apology would have been better,” he wrote in an email. “His candidate said something really stupid.”
Blanc was already in hot water for several past inflammatory statements. On Sunday, a Sept. 7 letter from B’nai Brith Canada, made public by the PQ, revealed she called herself “intolerant” toward Outremont’s Hasidic community in a blog post from 2007, adding “it would be much easier for them and for me if they disappeared from my sight, as it seems impossible that I disappear from theirs.” She also deleted a Tweet last month urging people in her riding to “votez Blanc” (“vote white”).
B’nai Brith has said all of Blanc’s comments taken together show intolerance toward Jews, Muslims, black people and other people of colour — considering one of her rivals is a Muslim from Pakistan — and asked that Lisée remove Blanc as a candidate.
In response, Lisée called B’nai Brith a “fringe group” and accused it of trying to “throw a grenade” into the PQ campaign and trample Blanc’s freedom of expression.
“She asked the question, saying other (Hasidic communities chose to locate themselves outside the urban centre), and said why not (Outremont’s Hasidic community)? I defend the right of the Hasidic community to be in Montreal and to thrive, and that’s my stance, but I will defend the right of anyone to criticize that group or other groups.”
He also defended Blanc’s tweet about Hitler, calling it dark comedy, and citing as an example the Mel Brooks movie and subsequent Broadway play The Producers, which uses Hitler jokes throughout.
“This is a ridiculous conversation; we have the right to laugh about it or not.”
Lisée seemed frustrated at times that the questions about Blanc overshadowed his party’s environmental program.
It calls for a halt in the construction of most of the Réseau electrique métropolitain — a $6.3-billion project for which construction has already begun — to link the downtown to the West Island, the airport, South Shore and DeuxMontagnes.
The PQ would instead spend $7.4 billion on a plan the party calls le grand déblocage, which calls for extensions of nearly all existing commuter train lines to the outer reaches of the Montreal region, like Ste-Hyacinthe and Joliette, several tramways within Montreal including one to the airport, and adding express buses on several major highways. The PQ has said its plan will remove 325,000 cars from roads by 2025, which would amount to a 25 per cent reduction.
On Monday, as REM workers were setting up construction sites in St-Laurent’s Technoparc, Lisée tempered his pledge to cancel most of the project, saying a PQ government would have to study the cost benefits.
“When we get to power, we’ll do our due diligence on the cost benefits on stopping parts of the REM that are nonsensical, and transferring this money to the grand déblocage,” he said. “Our evaluation is that getting out of two-thirds of the REM will be largely beneficial.”
The PQ’s plan also sets targets for 25 per cent of vehicle sales to be electric or hybrid by the year 2025, 50 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2035.