Weakness sends Legault into freefall

François Legault has shown that he is simply not qualified to be premier

Baseball great Yogi Berra said two things that apply to the Oct. 1 Quebec general election.

One is “it ain’t over ’til it’s over.” But if you hear a politician quote that one, then according to Macpherson’s First Rule of Politics, it already is over, at least for them.

Berra also said, explaining why he was blinded by the early-setting sun in an October-afternoon World Series game, that “it gets late early out there.”

And it’s getting late early in the election campaign. Advance voting began Friday, and in the last election in 2014, more than

one-quarter (27 per cent) of the total votes were cast early.

So, time is running out for the Parti Québécois and its leader in particular. Even though JeanFrançois Lisée lived up to expectations as the best pure debater among the major party leaders (except in their crucial third debate on Thursday), his party is still running third.

The PQ has failed to replace François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec party as the leading alternative to the incumbent Liberals for the three-quarters of French-speaking voters who, after 15 years of nearly uninterrupted Liberal rule, want a change of government.

Lisée’s party has taken just enough support from the CAQ to help the Liberals back into contention. But a perception that the Liberals might be re-elected could drive “change” votes from the PQ to the Coalition. And not because of Legault, but in spite of him.

Since the leaders’ debates began last week, Legault has been Free-falling Frank, the Air Transat co-founder piloting his party into a nosedive that must have had its candidates reaching for the barf bags.

The immigrant-expulsion proposal on which Legault flew into so much turbulence may not have been hastily scrawled on an air-sickness bag, like future prime minister Brian Mulroney’s constitutional policy in the 1983 Progressive Conservative leadership campaign. (Mulroney came up with nine points, and to make it an even 10, threw in “Canada is a great country.”) But it seems like it.

There’s no evidence that CAQ supporters suddenly turned against Legault’s three-year-old proposal itself. The president of the CROP polling firm said this week its research shows that the “value” that has distinguished Coalition voters the most is “ethnic intolerance.”

More likely, Legault’s inability or unwillingness to defend his choice for the decisive “ballot question” not only disappointed its supporters but also showed that he is simply not qualified to be premier.

After two previous campaigns as leader of a third-party underdog, he has not had a free ride in this one (unlike Manon Massé of Québec solidaire). For the first time, Legault has come under the scrutiny and pressure of being the front-runner.

And he’s folded, exposing weaknesses that include certain Trumpian traits: improvisation, ignorance and laziness. Not only did he not know how the present immigration system works, he didn’t do his homework even after the media started grilling him on it.

The polls will tell whether Legault recovered in Thursday’s debate on Quebecor’s TVA network, which devoted more time than the previous ones to identity issues, on which Legault aggressively attacked Liberal Philippe Couillard.

In particular, on the wearing of religious symbols by public-sector employees, Legault appealed to the French-speaking audience with the populist argument that majority public opinion must prevail over fundamental freedoms, which Couillard courageously defended.

For in Quebec politics, it takes courage to defend fundamental freedoms.

Legault, through a spokesperson, has denied telling a PQ audience in 1998, when he first ran for that party, that having been raised in Montreal’s West Island among the English, “I hate them as much as you do.”

The source of that story, however, is unimpeachable: Graham Fraser, a former journalist who earned a rare level of respect in Quebec political circles, from everyone from Péquistes to anglos.

And while it’s possible for any human to err, if Fraser recalls that Legault said it, then I’m 99 per cent certain he did.