Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault waves from his campaign bus in Quebec City in 2012. He announced his resignation as the province's premier on Wednesday.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
For several minutes on Wednesday, a visibly deflated François Legault sought to put the best face on his hero-to-zero run as Quebec’s 32nd premier, highlighting his efforts to save “the maximum number of lives” during the COVID-19 pandemic and touting his province’s superior economic performance to that of neighbouring Ontario.
Ultimately, however, Mr. Legault failed in his mission to shift the paradigm of Quebec politics from the existential brooding over the province’s place in (or out of) Canada that had sustained a Liberal-Parti Québécois duopoly to a more conventional right-left continuum based on economics.
With his 2011 creation of the Coalition Avenir Québec, Mr. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, established an alliance of bleus and rouges and vowed to put the independence question on hold to focus on the massive economic challenges facing the province as its infrastructure creaked and its population aged.
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In the end, he did not bridge the sovereigntist-federalist divide, and may even have encouraged it by overriding certain Charter rights to adopt contentious secularism and linguistic laws and by depicting federal immigration policies as a threat to the survival of Quebec’s distinct identity and culture.
With his sudden resignation after steadfastly insisting he would lead the CAQ into the 2026 election, Mr. Legault leaves his party in the lurch without an heir apparent and facing annihilation against a resurgent PQ and a resilient Liberal Party. His departure is more likely to hasten the CAQ’s demise than to reinvigorate it under a new leader. The CAQ has no Mark Carney-like saviour waiting in the wings.
While almost all popular premiers eventually become unpopular as the wear and tear of power takes its toll, Mr. Legault’s downfall remains one of the most spectacular such slides in recent Canadian political history, surpassing even Justin Trudeau’s fall from grace. Mr. Trudeau’s popularity never rose to the heights that Mr. Legault’s once did, when his folksy style captured the hearts of Quebeckers.
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Voters soured on him as a series of governance failures undermined his claim to managerial competence. As an accountant and co-founder of Air Transat, Mr. Legault pitched himself as a hard-headed businessman. But after inheriting a massive budget surplus from the previous Liberal government, the CAQ has left Quebec with a large structural deficit and growing debt ratio.
Mr. Legault’s government bet hundreds of millions of dollars on a plan to make Quebec an electric-battery manufacturing hub, only to see the linchpin of that plan – the construction of a gigafactory by Swedish upstart Northvolt – go up in smoke with the firm’s bankruptcy. It pursued a politically motivated and much criticized scheme to build a tunnel under the St. Lawrence River linking Quebec City to its south-shore suburbs. It failed to intervene to staunch huge cost overruns on an IT program at the provincial automobile insurance board.
Mr. Legault’s proudest personal legacy – a renegotiation of the 1969 Churchill Falls hydroelectric contract between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, coupled with an agreement to develop new hydro projects on the Churchill River – remains a singular achievement given the tortured history of bitter relations between the two provinces. But the deal could still come undone as Newfoundland’s new Progressive Conservative government conducts a review of the agreement signed by its Liberal predecessor.
The coup de grâce for Mr. Legault came, however, with the pre-Christmas resignation of health minister Christian Dubé after the Premier repudiated reforms aimed at tying doctors’ salaries to performance objectives. While the CAQ had already lost the public-relations battle as Quebeckers sided with physicians who threatened to leave the province over the reforms, Mr. Dubé’s public rebuke of his boss reinforced the impression of a Premier who had lost the trust of his cabinet, caucus and electorate.
Where does Mr. Legault’s resignation leave Quebec politics only nine months before an election? The answer is: wide open.
PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who vows to hold a third sovereignty referendum if his party wins the October vote, has demonstrated a tone-deaf tendency to fly off the handle, feeding doubts about his temperament and readiness to govern. The Liberals are poised to crown a novice politician – former business lobbyist Charles Milliard – as their leader as they seek to move on from Pablo Rodriguez’s disastrous false start amid a funding scandal.
The right-wing Quebec Conservative Party under the speed-talking Éric Duhaime is experiencing a bump in the polls as some disaffected Caquistes seek a new political home. The far-left Québec Solidaire has been fading fast, though it can still count on its militant base of urban progressives.
Get ready for an interesting year in Quebec politics.