Cocaine and cabinet don’t mix

like to think of

themselves as the most tolerant people in Canada, and as such they’re probably ready for an openly gay person as premier. But it’s not clear they’re ready for a former cokehead.

This is a huge problem for André Boisclair, the 39-year-old front-runner in the Parti Québécois leadership race.

It’s one thing for Boisclair to be flirting for laughs on-air with the host of

as he was on the RadioCanada hit interview show the other night. And it’s quite another for him to admit to using cocaine while a member of the Parti Québécois cabinet from 1996 to 2003, as he finally did on Monday, after being on the run from the media for the previous three days.

He wasn’t in college, he was at the cabinet table.

This was not a youthful indiscretion, and cocaine is not a recreational drug, but a highly addictive and extremely expensive substance. It’s not like Bill Clinton saying he tried to inhale, but couldn’t. It’s not like George W. Bush saying when he was young and irresponsible, he was young and irresponsible.

Boisclair’s use of cocaine raises other questions. Who was his supplier? How much was he paying? And was he, as a minister of the Crown, susceptible to blackmail by unsavoury elements?

After all, possession and dealing of cocaine are in the Criminal Code. It’s a crime to possess it, and a crime to sell it. And for a politician, it’s worse than a crime, as Robert Bourassa used to say, it’s a mistake.

The penalties for possession under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act range from six months imprisonment for a first offence to a maximum of seven years. Trafficking in cocaine carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Boisclair doesn’t like these questions.

“I know what kind of spiral I’m being dragged into,” he said Monday, when he finally acknowledged being a past user, without using the word cocaine. “ Then it will be how many times and with whom, under what circumstances, what date and at which moment. Can’t we just move on? What more do you want from me than a confession?”

Well, yes, they will want answers to all those questions, and then some.

Boisclair essentially threw himself at the mercy of the public, saying he relied on the good judgement of Quebecers, adding “I am in full possession of my faculties.”

This is now. That was then.

While trying to limit the damage from his admission of cocaine use, Boisclair only made matters worse by blaming his leadership opponent, Pauline Marois, and the office of Premier Jean Charest, for leaking the story to the media.

Boisclair was first confronted with his former drug use last Friday when he was asked point blank at a news conference whether he had ever used cocaine while he was a cabinet minister. “Thank you, thank you very much. Goodbye,” he said, walking out on his own event. Then on Sunday night, after launching his campaign at the Spectrum, a renowned Montreal disco, he again avoided reporters.

In the circumstances, it probably wasn’t a good idea to launch his campaign in a nightclub. And in the context of a PQ leadership campaign, it was ill-advised of Boisclair to compare himself to the founding father, René Lévesque. “Not only can we do as well as he did, but perhaps with all our talent, we’re capable of doing better than Lévesque,” he said.

There’s an expression in French that fits this perfectly. Only 23 when first elected in 1989, Boisclair was the youngest member of the Quebec National Assembly, and only 30 when he first joined Lucien Bouchard’s cabinet in 1996. Bouchard’s chief of staff, Hubert Thibault, warned him on at least one occasion about his drug use. He quit the legislature last year to pursue a one-year diploma at the Kennedy School in Boston, and made such a big deal of it on his Web site you’d think he was the only Quebecer who’d ever been to Harvard. He took a job with McKinsey consultants in Toronto in a further attempt to broaden his horizons, when the PQ leadership unexpectedly came open in June.

Boisclair became the candidate of generational change, and jumped to a 2- 1 lead over Marois in the polls. As for his being openly gay, only 11% of Quebecers in a CROP poll thought that was an obstacle to his running the province.

But being a former cocaine user, being in denial and then blaming it on his opponents, that’s something else. One of the tests of a politician is whether he can take a hit. Boisclair is taking a very big one this week. National Post

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy Options, the magazine of

the Institute for Research on

Public Policy.

imacdonald@ irpp. org