Round One goes to Marois
PHILIPPE COUILLARD failed to live up to unrealistic expectations about his return to the assembly that he himself had helped create
Prime Minister’s Question Time. Very frightening. Like being mugged by a guinea pig.
— British Prime Minister Francis Urquhart, BBC television serial To Play the King
P auline Marois had little reason to fear a mugging by Philippe Couillard in Quebec’s version of question time when the National Assembly session resumed on Tuesday after the winter recess.
While it was Couillard’s first question period as leader of the Liberal official opposition, Marois had been practising as premier since the opening of the 40th legislature in October 2012.
What’s more, parliamentary procedure favours the government in the question period.
“It’s called question period, not answer period,” goes an old parliamentary saying.
As anybody who watches a question period soon realizes, the government is not required to give a direct answer to a question.
In Quebec’s assembly, a member who deems an answer unsatisfactory can’t complain to the president, or speaker, in the form of a point of order.
And most important, the government always has the last word in the exchange of questions and answers.
The best the opposition can hope for is to surprise the government with a question for which it is not prepared, which rarely happens, or at least to make it obvious that the government has avoided answering the question.
So it was unreasonable to expect that Tuesday’s question period in the assembly would be a turning point for Couillard’s shaky leadership of the Liberal Party. He should have downplayed his return to the assembly after an absence of nearly six years, treating the remainder of the current legislature as much-needed practice to hone his debating and media skills before the general election campaign.
He also needs to settle a party caucus that has become so nervous that on the eve of Couillard’s arrival, Liberal MNA Henri-François Gautrin publicly predicted the party’s electoral defeat, before he was forced to reverse himself.
Couillard, however, allowed Tuesday’s question period to be built up in advance to the level of a decisive campaign debate. And he even contributed to the hype by describing his preparations in interviews reported on the weekend.
He scouted the assembly chamber, the Salon bleu, in advance, to familiarize himself with the locations of his seat and Marois’s. He practised with Jean-Marc Fournier, who had led the Liberals in the assembly during Couillard’s absence, playing the role of Marois. He even studied Marois’s tendencies in answering questions. In the real question period, Couillard had the self-discipline to avoid asking wordy questions that would allow Marois to choose which part to answer.
His questions were short and simple, making it easier to notice when she evaded answering them.
He failed, however, to elicit any new information or surprise Marois with his choice of a topic: whether or not her government will table its budget for the next fiscal year, to begin April 1, before a possible snap election call.
It’s a question she had recently refused to answer, and refused to answer again when Couillard asked it.
Anyway, that question will become moot when either the government tables a budget, or Marois calls an election without one.
Indeed, by the time Couillard asked about it, the government had already said it was preparing a budget, and there was a reported rumour that it was considering tabling a budget Feb. 20.
If this was the equivalent of a campaign debate, there wasn’t the proverbial knockout punch, which Couillard had even less chance of landing in the question period than in an actual debate.
He failed to live up to the unrealistic expectations that he had helped to set. And the premier emerged unmugged.