Attacks on QS show rivals are scared, Massé says
With six days left in the campaign and a last-minute surge in the polls, Québec solidaire gathered more than two dozen of its Montreal candidates downtown Wednesday to position themselves as the only progressive choice for Quebecers, and to dismiss attempts to paint them as a party of Marxists.
“The old political class is bringing out the heavy artillery,” party co-spokesperson Manon Massé said. “They attack, they threaten, (they bring up) Marxism. Mr. Lisée, remember: you are criticizing us today for the exact same things the Parti Québécois was criticized for under René Lévesque. I take that as a compliment, because I remember.
“I remember a people that were not overcome by fear. When we didn’t vote for the least bad out of a weak bunch, but out of enthusiasm, out of hope for the future.”
On Monday in an interview on CBC, Massé said her party is Marxist if that means it supports combating climate change and putting people first. The exchange was in reaction to a comment by PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée that her party was full of anti-capitalists and Marxists. Massé later retracted the Marxism comment, saying she misspoke in English and defied having her party labelled.
“I am not a Marxist. I am not Communist. Voila, that’s it,” she said Wednesday. “Québec solidaire, at its base, has but one objective. To do all it can so that our people live better. I don’t know of any Marxists that are infiltrating our party. We have more than 20,000 members. It’s our members that give us our direction. And I think it’s good, our direction.”
Asked about fears her party’s proposals to tax businesses and the more wealthy could cause another corporate flight from Quebec, Massé said only $1 billion of the $13 billion the party would spend to fund free education and subsidized dental care would come from higher taxation. It would be raised through increased corporate taxes on big businesses and higher income tax for people earning more than $97,000, and especially those earning more than $225,000, “because we think it’s time for them to pay their fair share.”
“We have other places to get the money — Big Pharma. We lose, year after year, $3.5 billion because the last government didn’t fight with them to have a good price. Québec solidaire will.”
“For individual income tax, 77 per cent of people will have a reduction of their income taxes,” under a QS government, she said.
That QS is gaining ground in ridings outside of Montreal for the first time, in places like Taschereau in Quebec City and Abitibi-Témiscamingue, is proof, she said, that the winds of change are blowing because people are responding to the party’s environmental message of the importance to fight climate change.
Québec solidaire is the only party that promises radical change from an outdated past and old political parties, she said.
“Are you not tired of being told that dental insurance is not possible because mining royalties are the things of banana republics? Are you not tired of being told that we cannot have affordable public transit because there is a third (automobile) link to be constructed between Quebec City and (the Quebec City suburb of ) Lévis?”
It is time, she said, on Oct. 1, “to remember that hope always wins over fear.”