Integrity is first pillar in the PQ’s mandate

On

a day that Mayor Gérald Tremblay spent holed up in Montreal’s city hall like a criminal in his hideout surrounded by police, Pauline Marois delivered the premier’s opening speech at the start of a new session of the National Assembly.

There was a connection between the two: The testimony in the public hearings of the Charbonneau inquiry, which has come to dominate politics in Quebec at the municipal and provincial levels, and will continue to do so for several more months.

That testimony had driven Tremblay into seclusion, the moral authority of the mayor of Quebec’s metropolis in shreds.

It was to avoid further damage from the inquiry’s fall hearings that former premier Jean Charest had been forced to call a fall election, resulting in Marois’s becoming Quebec’s first female premier.

It was as rising public indignation at the testimony reached the level of fury that Marois delivered her first session-opening speech.

And it’s the hearings, those that have already taken place and those still to come, that could determine whether she will last long enough as premier to deliver another one.

Sessions of the Assembly usually last about two years, and in the normal, four-year term of a majority government, there are usually two.

And usually, a majority government uses the first session of a legislature to do the unpopular things it thinks are necessary, and the second to get itself into position before it calls the next election.

But a minority government has a life expectancy of only about a year and a half (though Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s two Conservative minority governments both survived for a year longer than that).

So when Marois delivered her first opening speech, her government, and the opposition parties facing it in the Assembly, were already in the pre-campaign for the next election.

And for the first part of that precampaign, at least until next summer (and possibly into next fall, if the Charbonneau Commission needs an extension of its mandate), the inquiry’s hearings will continue.

That means “integrity” will continue to be the dominant issue in politics in Quebec — as it was in Marois’s speech.

At times, it sounded like an election-campaign speech, with Marois promising something for every interest group in either the electorate or her own party.

But, riding the current wave of public rage created by the Charbonneau testimony, she clearly established integrity as her priority.

It was the first of the four “pillars” of her government that she mentioned in her speech, and the one for which she made the firmest, most specific commitments, some of which she said she hoped to realize before the end of the year.

The government’s first bill, she said, will focus on integrity, and it is be introduced Thursday — which also happens to be the 25th anniversary of the death of René Lévesque, who not only founded the PQ but reformed Quebec’s political financing system.

Marois is to attend a commemorative ceremony at Lévesque’s statue on the grounds of the Assembly in the morning, a photo op providing an illustration for the introduction of her government’s Bill 1.

In her speech Wednesday, she acknowledged her government’s minority status in the Assembly.

But she might still have the upper hand in the Assembly, thanks to the Charbonneau Commission.

A minority government can survive as long as it’s not in the interest of opposition parties holding a majority of seats to force an election.

And after seeing Tremblay’s devastation after a few days of testimony before the inquiry, the official opposition Liberals might not want to risk an election as long as the hearings are going on.