A new government, showing signs of age

DON

MACPHERSON

Less than three months after its swearing-in, Premier Pauline Marois’s Parti Québécois government was showing signs of having aged prematurely.

We expect governments to be like people: A new one will be full of idealism. As it gets older, it gets used to compromising its principles and acting secretively, and its members become isolated from the public, and careless.

All those signs of aging are already apparent in the Marois government’s handling of the appointment of former PQ leader André Boisclair as Quebec’s delegategeneral to New York.

The appointment appeared to be a reward for Boisclair’s loyalty to Marois. Of her last four predecessors — the PQ changes leaders that often — Boisclair is the only one who hasn’t criticized her.

But even new governments make patronage appointments such as Boisclair’s, and the New York posting, previously held by Liberal John Parisella, has long been treated as a plum.

And when Boisclair’s appointment was announced Nov. 7, no one suggested that the sophisticated, fluently bilingual former cabinet minister wasn’t qualified.

It wasn’t until this week that the appointment was criticized, after it was re- vealed that Boisclair was benefiting from a secret, unprecedented sweetheart deal. It consisted of a second appointment, to a senior civilservice job that would give Boisclair a lifetime salary starting at $170,000 a year and indexed to the cost of living, and make him eligible for a full pension at age 55 — in nine years.

The civil-service job wasn’t mentioned in the announcement of Boisclair’s appointment to New York by the premier’s office. What’s more, it was reported that not even the cabinet, which approved the New York appointment, realized it came with a second one.

Apparently Marois and International Relations Minister Jean-François Lisée, who are responsible for the second appointment, had forgotten the lesson of the 2005 “Jewish schools” incident. That’s when Liberal premier Jean Charest was caught trying to sneak full public funding for Jewish private schools past his own cabinet.

The lesson is that nothing done in the government is certain to remain a secret.

After the deal with Boisclair was revealed, Lisée misled the National Assembly by citing a precedent for the second appointment that turned out to be false. He had to apologize.

He called it a “gaffe.” But the sweetheart deal and the attempt to conceal it were deliberate acts.

Lisée said Boisclair had made the civil-service appointment a condition of his accepting the New York posting in return for giving up his business interests. But it wouldn’t have been hard to find somebody else who was suitable but less demanding to fill the prize New York position.

And even for Boisclair, the second appointment proved not to be a deal-breaker, since he agreed to give it up after it was disclosed and kept the New York job anyway.

Marois, who has been in politics for more than 30 years, said it “never crossed (her) mind” that Boisclair’s second appointment would be criticized. Then why did her office conceal it?

And with a straight face, Lisée tried to spin the controversy as “the best news of the week” that Quebecers hold the PQ government to higher ethical standards than they did its Liberal predecessor.

But it’s not the first time the new government has failed to live up to the standards it has set for itself.

After Marois promised to adhere to the highest standards of integrity in order to restore public confidence in politics, it was revealed last week that she had appointed a cabinet minister knowing of his record of unethical behaviour. The minister, Daniel Breton, was forced to resign.

The PQ’s problem is not that it’s being judged by new standards. It’s that the new government is already failing to live up to the old ones.

dmacpherson@ montrealgazette.com Twitter: @MacphersonGaz