Boisclair sweeps to PQ victory
Young star defeats party veteran on first ballot Overcomes controversy over cocaine use
QUEBEC CITY—
André Boisclair swept to victory on the first ballot last night, winning the Parti Québécois leadership race with almost 54 per cent of the vote.
Pauline Marois, his closest competitor, captured only 30.5 per cent of members’ votes, while the six other candidates trailed far behind.
At 39, Boisclair becomes the youngest Quebec party leader since Robert Bourassa was elected in 1970, and the first openly gay political party leader in Canadian history.
Saying he accepted his mandate with “ humility and great enthusiasm,” Boisclair thanked every one of his opponents and applauded them in a gesture of party unity.
Boisclair called on all sovereignists to pull together to achieve Quebec independence.
“ More than ever, tonight everything becomes possible,” he told the cheering crowd of several thousand that packed into an industrial fairground to hear the results. He singled out Marois, the former cabinet minister who first sought the PQ leadership 20 years ago, for praise.
“ Pauline, you have had a large place in our party and you will have a large place in our party,” he said.
Boisclair vowed, as he did when he launched his campaign in June, to bring together the older generation that founded the Parti Québécois with the generation of young Quebecers. A year ago, Boisclair was a graduate student at Harvard, having left politics to get a degree. He had dropped out of university in 1989 to run for office.
Claude Charron, a former cabinet minister and now a TV host, met him in Boston.
“ He told me he would get back into politics — in 2012,” Charron said last night, with a chuckle. But when Bernard Landry stepped down as leader in June, Boisclair decided to give up a job offer in Toronto with the consulting firm McKinsey and announced his candidacy. The frontrunner from the beginning, Boisclair put together an effective organization and brought 37,000 new members into the PQ.
However, he appeared to be in difficulty in the last 10 days because of controversy over his admission he used cocaine when he was a minister in Lucien Bouchard’s PQ government.
But he won convincingly last night, and set out immediately to try to heal the wounds caused by a divisive campaign.
It was a bitter race, even for a fractious party like the PQ.
Boisclair was hounded by reporters about his past cocaine use, and reacted defensively, saying little.
In debates, he was smooth and carefully coached, but occasionally irritatingly glib.
Marois, 56, was the most experienced, the most poised, the most at ease with the details of government, but never managed to achieve charisma.
Richard Legendre, a former tennis champion, was a superficial candidate, basing his arguments on the report commissioned by former PQ minister François Legault, which claimed that independence would make $ 176 billion available to Quebec over five years.
Louis Bernard, 67, a veteran senior public servant and federalprovincial negotiator, provided a certain amount of blunt common sense, but did not manage to penetrate the public imagination. The other candidates were Ghislain Lebel, Jean- Claude StAndré, Pierre Dubuc and Jean Ouimet. Gilbert Paquette withdrew in favour of Marois. The race began last June, when Landry, a former premier, astonished his party by resigning as leader after receiving a 76- percent endorsement at the party convention. The winner takes over a sharply divided party, where internal divisions have been exacerbated by a bitter leadership campaign. The Parti Québécois has always been an unwieldy coalition of hardline secessionists, softer nationalists, social democrats and conservatives.
“ To say thatto rebuild the unity of the party will be the great challenge of the next leader assumes that it existed before,” columnist Michel David wrote in yesterday’s Le Devoir. “It would be more accurate to say that the challenge of every leader of the PQ consists in maintaining the fragile balance between the diverse factions that cohabit the party, more or less comfortably.” René Lévesque, who founded the party in 1968 and led it until he stepped down in 1985, managed to subdue the hardliners in the party, but it was a constant struggle.
Pierre Marc Johnson, a moderate, succeeded Lévesque in the last leadership vote in the party, 20 years ago. Every succeeding leader — Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry — has been chosen by acclamation.
At first glance, the new leader is in an enviable position. The Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest is unpopular, the sponsorship scandal and the details described in the Gomery report have further discredited federalism, polls show that support for sovereignty is over 50 per cent, and the Bloc Québécois is poised to do very well in the federal election. As a result, it is easy to think that the PQ has just chosen the next premier of Quebec. But this leadership contest has opened all the fissures in the party, leading some observers to speculate that the party might blow apart from internal tensions. The party, which is only half the size it was when Lévesque was leader, having dropped from 300,000 to 140,000 members, committed itself last June a referendum within its first mandate, should it be elected, and declaring Quebec to be sovereign following a Yes vote.
All of the candidates endorsed this position — except for Bernard, who argued that this
would lead to chaos
and uncertainty, and
that there would have
to be a transitional period while negotiations
took place with the federal government over
the transfer of powers. But Bernard’s insistence that independence had to be achieved “ correctly,” that Quebec would get no international recognition if it declared itself to be sovereign after a referendum, was largely ignored by the other candidates. The campaign heightened tensions between moderates — who argue that Quebec should reduce the regulatory and interventionist role of the state — and the left wing of the party, which cheers calls for more aggressive taxation of the rich.
At the same time, there were indications of consensus among the candidates, on among other things, the federal Clarity Act. All said that the act, which gives the federal government a role in deciding if the question is clear and the result is clear in a referendum, is an illegitimate intrusion on Quebec’s right to decide its own future.