The Boisclair blowback
André Boisclair, the leading candidate to succeed Bernard Landry as Parti Québécois leader, has been exposed as someone who has used recreational drugs in the past. The nature of the drug in question — cocaine — does raise fair and obvious questions about Mr. Boisclair’s judgment. Cocaine is a far more dangerous and addictive substance than the drug that politicians are normally forced to admit using: marijuana. Still, there is nothing to suggest this is anything other than how Mr. Boisclair has characterized it: an error of his (comparative) youth.
That is not to say he was a teenager when he experimented with cocaine. He was a PQ MNA and cabinet minister at the time. And while there is no evidence the drug ever affected his performance as a minister of the Crown in Quebec, Mr. Boisclair goes too far when he declares, “I always behaved responsibly.”
Still, there is no evidence that Mr. Boisclair was anything more than a casual user. And there is no evidence, as he says with respect to his political career, that “I found myself in a situation where I was not in full possession of my faculties.” Nor is there any evidence that he has used the drug in years.
In other words, there is no reason for the revelations to end Mr. Boisclair’s quest for the Parti Québécois leadership, and indeed this should not be the issue upon which his ultimate success is decided.
What many Quebecers find appealing about Mr. Boisclair is the fact that he comes from a generation younger than the PQ warhorses who have dominated the separatist camp in Quebec for years. One consequence of that is that he was exposed to a different pharmacology than his older compatriots. PQ supporters, and Quebecers in general, should be sophisticated enough to understand that.
Mr. Boisclair has owned up to his past. Like those of most human beings, it is not one of unadulterated purity and light. Some observers suggest that he could actually be helped politically by his frank admission. That is going too far. Former cocaine use is not an asset in a party leadership candidate, but so long as it is something that is consigned to the past, then neither should it be a candidate’s undoing. If there are questions about Mr. Boisclair’s judgment, then they should be focused where it matters: on his determined separatism.