Marois satisfied with trip to N.Y.C.

Met with investors, spoke to U.S. foreign policy organization

NEW YORK — Premier Pauline Marois pronounced her visit to New York a success Friday, noting that it has been 100 days since she won the Sept. 4 election.

But first she extended “in the name of Quebecers” her sympathy to families of the victims of a Con-gunman in Connecticut.

Marois said she did not want to comment on the issue of gun control in the United States and whether it is too easy to get firearms, “but we must preserve the (Quebec) gun registry.”

Marois said her meetings with investors interested in expanding operations in Quebec, her interviews with U.S. media and her speech to the Foreign Policy Association gave her a chance to explain the priorities of her government.

“We are going to be an economically and socially responsible government,” she said. “And we still want to have good links with our American friends and invite them, if they want to, to invest in Quebec.

“Today I have completed a mission to New York which allowed me to shed light on the orientations of the sovereignist government of the Parti Québécois for American political and economic decision-makers,” she said.

Among those Marois met were representatives of CSX, an American rail company contemplating a project near Beauharnois, and the New York investment bank Morgan Stanley, which began operating a software development team in Montreal in 2008, with 280 jobs.

The bank, which uses the secure, online banking products developed in Montreal for its international banking network, told the premier it has a total of 580 jobs in Montreal now and wants to raise the number to 700 next year.

Morgan Stanley told Marois the reason it does this work in Montreal

“We are going to be an economically and socially responsible government.”

PREMIER PAULINE MAROIS

is because of tax breaks offered by the Quebec government and the qualified manpower in the province to fill information technology jobs.

Earlier, Jean-François Lisée, Marois’s minister of many hats, said in an interview that his role as international trade minister is “top of mind.”

Lisée accompanied Marois on her two-day mission to New York, which was also aimed at selling more Quebec products in the United States.

Lisée calls this approach “smart diversification,” explaining that “there are only eight million of us and there is (just) so much we can do.”

He underlined that past efforts to diversify Quebec’s economy paid off when the economic slowdown hit. By contrast, Ontario, with its concentration in the auto sector, was harder hit.

Quebec has been developing new export markets in addition to the prime U.S. market, with sales in Europe and China, along with rising exports to Russia — mainly of pork, aerospace products and building materials suited to the Russian climate.

Marois also announced the opening of a New York office of Expansion Québec, a new body within Lisée’s department. Expansion Québec will offer Quebec companies wanting to make it in New York a Manhattan address and it can rent them space in Midtown, while offering mentoring and contact advice.

Lisée’s department also includes international relations, the Francophonie, responsibility for Montreal, relations with Quebec’s anglophones and trade.