Respect election results

PQ’s spirit of ‘sovereignist governance’ doesn’t reflect the election results. Editorial,

“Quebecers chose change,” said Pauline Marois of the Sept. 4 election result, when she was formally sworn in as premier on Wednesday along with the people she appointed to her new provincial cabinet.

That’s true to the extent that a majority voted for parties other than the Liberals who formed the previous government. However, fewer than one-third of the electorate voted for the sort of change that the Parti Québécois was dangling during the election campaign.

Nevertheless, it was made clear as Marois and her cabinet assumed the reins of power that the administration will proceed in the spirit of “sovereignist governance,” whether or not this squares with the province’s best interests or what most Quebecers voted for this month.

In that respect, Marois has reiterated since the election that her government would move quickly to cancel the university tuition-fee increase imposed by the outgoing government. She proposes to do so by decree, without the bother of having the measure approved by the National Assembly, even though the increase was duly legislated and passed by majority vote in the legislature and a majority of Quebecers voted for parties that advocated substantial fee hikes.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the newly appointed minister for higher education, ex-journalist Pierre Duchesne, manages to reconcile the students who agitated en masse all spring for no tuition increases and university administrators who will make a strong case that without the extra funding that fee hikes would have brought them, the quality of higher education in Quebec is at risk of serious decline.

And it will be interesting as well to see how Jean-François Lisée, a leading proponent of the PQ’s harder line on enforcing Frenchlanguage primacy in the province, will manage as minister responsible for relations with the anglophone community.

It is to the new government’s credit that such a responsibility has been formally designated, but seeing to anglo concerns seems likely to be a secondary preoccupation for Lisée, who also has been assigned ministerial responsibility for Montreal and international affairs.

Ideally, there would be a full-time minister and a provincial department for anglophone affairs, equivalent to Ontario’s minister and department of francophone affairs. But that would be asking too much of this government, and perhaps any Quebec government, even though the percentage of anglophones in Quebec is more than twice that of francophones in Ontario.

All Quebecers will be watching closely to see how the government rises to the stark economic challenges facing the province: a persistent budgetary deficit, staggering provincial debt and sluggishly performing economy. This, after having breezed through the campaign without presenting what most experts in the field would call a coherent and realistic economic plan.

The new finance minister, Nicolas Marceau, does have a way with numbers as a former economics professor, but he is notably bereft of business experience. Meanwhile, the natural resources minister, Martine Ouellet, is best known as a militant environmentalist who has been sharply critical of the Liberal Plan Nord for resource development and hos- tile toward the mining industry in general. And yet it is on the mining industry that this government is counting for a substantial revenue boost.

Key to the government’s image on the fiscal front will be whether it will be able to keep to the schedule of the former Liberal government of bringing the provincial budget into balance by the year after next. The political temptation will be great to distribute taxpayer-financed goodies to segments of the population in order to woo enough additional support to give it a majority government in the next election, which will undoubtedly come sooner than later.

Should it gain that majority, the PQ will be in better position than now to push for another referendum, which would be even more detrimental to Quebec’s interests than what the new government will probably wreak under its present minority circumstance.

The challenge for the opposition parties, which between them represent the majority of Quebecers, will be to present clear and sound counter-arguments in the months to come, and offer Quebecers a persuasive alternative to what might probably be the shambles of PQ governance.