Quebec Health Minister Yves Bolduc survived Premier Jean Charest's latest shuffle.
He's a Machiavelli-quoting, early-rising political dynamo, and it appears he's just won a high-stakes game of political chicken with his boss, Premier Jean Charest.
Amid a cabinet shuffle that saw a dozen ministers switch portfolios - and two jobs cut altogether - perhaps the largest figure left standing was Health Minister Yves Bolduc, a former family doctor and current opposition lightning rod who was widely rumoured to be marked for demotion.
Indeed, speculation has run rampant in provincial political circles that Dr. Bolduc had bluntly threatened to walk away from politics if he was pushed from his ministry's helm.
Although the energetic 53-year-old Saguenay native brushed aside that talk - and resulting headlines - as "fiction and conjecture that is absolutely false" at a news conference in Quebec City, he allowed in a later television interview that "I came into politics to do health."
According to people within the health system who are well acquainted with Dr. Bolduc's work habits, he rises with the dawn each morning and often makes it his first task to pore over that day's surgical waiting lists. He has reputedly instructed office clerks in some hospitals - he is famous for impromptu site visits - on how he likes his spreadsheets prepared and colour-coded.
But that same punctiliousness has led political opponents to describe him as a micromanaging meddler, and it hasn't rendered him immune to caustic criticism over his handling of waiting times, lingering nursing shortages or last year's mass vaccination for H1N1 influenza.
Groups ranging from the province's specialist doctors and the main nurses union to patients-rights advocates had bayed for Dr. Bolduc's ouster in recent months, but to no avail.
Mr. Charest went to unusual lengths to express his confidence in his Health Minister at the shuffle announcement, where he indicated that Dr. Bolduc "is a man with exceptional knowledge of the system, and he has our full support."
But an opposition Parti Québécois politician scoffed that Mr. Charest "yielded to blackmail" and was too concerned about losing Dr. Bolduc's Quebec City riding to risk having him quit in a huff.
In truth, the cabinet moves are perhaps best viewed as an exercise in conflict avoidance, both in form and in substance.
"[Mr. Charest]had to do something, he didn't want a repeat of the fireworks of the last session … he's really trying to reduce the tension," said Antonia Maioni, a Quebec watcher and head of McGill University's Institute for the Study of Canada.
Although he pared the number of ministers from 26 to 24, Mr. Charest maintained his policy of gender parity and welcomed an old new face back to the fold in the person of Jean-Marc Fournier.
The former Quebec municipal affairs and education minister was plucked from his post in federal Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's office, where sources said his departure has provoked dismay.
But the unelected Mr. Fournier's nomination to the Justice portfolio hardly qualifies as an infusion of new blood - no backbenchers were elevated to cabinet.
"It shows a lack of depth on the bench," Dr. Maioni said.
The Charest government has faced a torrid past few months, highlighted by allegations concerning judicial nominations and the government's refusal to hold a public inquiry in light of continuing corruption probes in the construction industry.
Through it all, three cabinet ministers have either resigned, been fired or quit politics.
After this week's exit of the pugnacious Jacques Dupuis, a former government house leader and public security minister, Mr. Charest decided it was time to shuffle the deck.
Abrasive ministers such as Mr. Dupuis and weaker performers Michelle Courchesne (shipped from Education to the Treasury Board) and Kathleen Weil (who went from Justice to Immigration) were replaced with more convivial, less aggressively partisan faces like Robert Dutil, who moves from Revenue to Public Safety, and Line Beauchamp, the soft-spoken former environment minister, who now oversees Education.
"Just because you move people around doesn't immediately make them better at their jobs," Bernard Drainville, the PQ's health critic, told a news conference in Quebec City.