Quebec headed for generational shift
The Quebec election is still more than four months away, but minds are already turning to the leadership campaigns that will almost inevitably follow.
If the October provincial vote fails to deliver a generational shift, its aftermath will.
With the leaders of two of the three main protagonists in the upcoming provincial battle unlikely to survive a defeat this fall, a certain amount of jostling for a strong position out of the succession starting gate is already underway.
It is not hard to see why that would be happening.
Take Philippe Couillard’s Liberal party. In his bid for a second mandate, the premier is facing only slightly better odds than his Ontario counterpart, Kathleen Wynne. A Léger poll published last month pegged the ruling Liberals 25 points behind the leading Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) in the francophone ridings that account for the bulk of the province’s seats.
Half-a-dozen ministers have already declined to seek re-election. Some of the star recruits Couillard brought in only four years ago are among those moving on.
One popular former Liberal minister announced this week she was coming out of retirement … to run for the CAQ.
All of which goes a long way to explain why Couillard’s biggest pre-election catch to date is someone who will not actually be running under his banner next fall, but who could well — if the Liberals lose in October — be vying to become the party’s new leader by this time next year.
It is certainly not for his track record as a political strategist that Couillard is appointing Quebec entrepreneur Alexandre Taillefer as the president of his party’s re-election campaign.
Taillefer is a political neophyte who has never seen the inside of an election war room.
But he does have a larger media footprint than most of the Liberals’ front-line candidates and a reputation for leading-edge ideas. The latter have been in relatively short supply in the backrooms of the party that has ruled Quebec for most of the last 15 years.
A self-described “social entrepreneur,” Taillefer, 46, came to fame as one of the guestinvestors on the Quebec version of the business audition show Dragons’ Den. He has media clippings to show for a reputation as a visionary participant in the new economy.
Among other ventures, he has introduced a fleet of electric taxis to Montreal. He owns Mishmash Media — a company that recently bought the magazine L’actualité. (Full disclosure: I write a monthly column in L’actualité that predates Taillefer’s acquisition by almost a decade. On Friday, he resigned the position of chairperson of the Mishmash board.)
Taillefer has long worn his political ambition on his sleeve. On that score, it appears he is even more addicted to politics than the average news junkie. In the wake of the news of his joining the Liberal team, Taillefer was found to hold or have held membership cards in the CAQ and the Parti Québécois (PQ). The latter is valid until 2020. To be fair, both parties would have rolled out the red carpet to bring him on board.
Couillard would likely have preferred to have Taillefer run for a seat. Short of being able to showcase the future economic star of a renewed Liberal cabinet, the premier has had to settle with putting a possible contender for his succession in the window.
Even before his appointment was official, the new Liberal campaign president had already proclaimed his intention to “reinvent” the party. Not all ambitious Liberals were amused.
They can always hope that by hitching his wagon to their party, Taillefer will attract more high-profile candidates and, in the process, help reverse the tide of the Liberals’ election fortunes, thereby postponing Couillard’s retirement by a few years.
The Liberal premier is hardly the only Quebec leader whose eventual succession is already fuelling both outside spec- ulation and internal calculations.
With the PQ at a loss to generate some pre-election momentum, some party insiders would be happy enough to see leader Jean-François Lisée abdicate in favour of Véronique Hivon, the popular MNA he appointed as deputy leader earlier this year.
The return to the PQ fold of economist Jean-Martin Aussant — a Jacques Parizeau protégé who led a sovereigntist breakaway party in the 2012 election — is also widely seen as a prelude to a leadership bid.
And then there is Lisée’s predecessor, Pierre-Karl Péladeau. The media tycoon makes no secret of his desire to eventually resume the political adventure he cut short to deal with a child custody battle two years ago. As in the case of Taillefer and the Liberals, few believe PKP would settle for a lesser PQ role than the top one he recently occupied.
Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.