I won’t be praising François Legault

A long political commitment does not make up for poor stewardship

(Texte français disponible ici.)

It was an “emotional farewell.” He had “a sense of duty to the state.” He “loved Quebec.” Tributes poured in after François Legault’s final speech in Quebec’s Assemblée Nationale. From his allies. From his opponents. From journalists.

“The entire nation is grateful.”

The “entire nation”? Really? With barely 10% of the vote for the CAQ, the party he founded, one might think otherwise.

And why exactly is he being honoured? For his accomplishments, or simply for having been there?

I won’t be praising François Legault for education, which he had made his priority. The number of Quebec teachers resigning has doubled since 2018. Every year, when school starts, thousands of classes have no teacher.

Young female teachers, in particular, continue to drop out en masse early in their careers. They asked for help and a slightly more stable and predictable work schedule. They were given money—which they deserved—but that didn’t solve any of the long-standing issues. Meanwhile, Quebec continues to have the worst high school graduation rate in the country.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the wait times in ERs, to see a family doctor or a specialist, or to undergo surgery—all of which have increased under his tenure. Our health-care system’s capacity to care for an aging population has declined, which spells disaster for the years ahead. A decisive shift toward home care for the elderly still has to happen. One might have hoped that a former Health Minister would have had time to reflect on what had and (mostly) hadn’t worked while he was in office. Instead of making the health-care behemoth more agile, he simply changed its name.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the doctors’ remuneration, which has risen yet again while our access to timely care is declining, even though he promised the opposite and lied to our faces multiple times about his recent failed reform. In Quebec, one in twenty family doctors now practices outside the public system. We could at least have regulated their fees and reimbursed the cost of the consultation for patients, as other provinces do. Apparently, it was too simple.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the thousands of seniors waiting for a spot in a long-term care facility. Nor for the Maison des aînés, a flagship promise of the CAQ which has become a costly and bitter failure. Seniors’ homes are currently unable to admit patients to full capacity due to staff shortages. Others have stayed empty since they were built. Meanwhile, many seniors are losing what little autonomy they have left, stuck in a hospital where they shouldn’t be, taking up already scarce hospital beds. The conversion of non-subsidized long-term care facilities is moving at a snail’s pace, adding the insult of financial ruin to the injury of old age.

I won’t be praising François Legault for early childhood services. Nearly 30 years after the introduction of the Centres de la petite enfance (or CPE), Quebec’s subsidized daycare services are still basically a lottery. If you’re lucky, your child will get a low-cost spot with qualified, stable staff. If you’re not, they’ll end up in a daycare that does the best it can with underpaid staff and the employee turnover that comes with it. Here too, the conversion into subsidized daycare centres is moving at the pace of bureaucracy.

Speaking of paperwork. The size of the government, in terms of the number of employees, has grown almost three times faster than Quebec’s population. In 2018, François Legault promised a leaner, more efficient government. Neither has materialized. We could also talk about the billion-plus dollars that SAAQClic will cost, or health-care IT projects, and the rest: of the 177 current IT projects the government is keeping track of, about a third are behind schedule, some for several years. Please say “hi” to cost overruns. I won’t be praising François Legault for that either.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the six billion swallowed up in corporate subsidies with no measurable results, and most of which were simply wasted: from Northvolt to Nemaska Lithium, including Lion Électrique, Recyclage Carbone Varennes, and the “flying whales,” to name just a few. In 2023–2024 alone, the Economy Ministry “invested” 2.5 billion in 1,850 projects. All this, of course, with minimal transparency, as if it were their money, and not ours.

I won’t be praising François Legault for our public debt, which is growing by about ten billion dollars each year, nor for the tax cuts while our public services are deteriorating and which even the Quebec Employers Council didn’t want. Nor for the flood of checks sent to nearly every taxpayer at a cost of several billion, which is the last thing to do if one wants to curb inflation. But then, maybe it was rather about the election than inflation.

I won’t be praising François Legault for our public infrastructure falling into ruin. For eight years, our bridges, roads, schools, and hospitals have continued to deteriorate faster than we repaired them. The asset maintenance deficit—that is, what it would take to fix everything up—is now $45 billion. Last week, we learned that this didn’t include our water infrastructure, which is literally leaking from all sides. That doubles the total to $90 billion. We could rebuild the pyramids of Egypt for less than that. Mr. Legault chose to have his own pharaonic project. Which leads us to…

I won’t be praising François Legault for staking a large portion of his political capital on a tunnel as useless as it is unrealistic. In its initial version, the proposed third link between Québec City and Lévis was the widest tunnel in the world, to be dug by a tunnel boring machine that had yet to be invented, in an area where soil stability was uncertain, to meet needs that are factually nonexistent and potentially worsen traffic congestion in the Québec City region—all without any studies to back it up. Six billion? Eight billion? Ten billion? It will cost whatever it costs. And as a CAQ minister famously said: “Lâchez-moi avec les GES !”. (Give me a break with the GHGs.) And with the data and the basics of urban planning, one might add.

The accursed tunnel changed from a single tunnel to a “bitube” before dying under the weight of its own indefensibility, only to be resurrected the day after a by-election in Quebec City, in which the CAQ took a beating. Yet, just a few months earlier, the deputy premier had explained, with a mountain of files, that the third link was unjustifiable and would never see the light of day. Unable to dig his tunnel, Mr. Legault has instead plowed a deep furrow of cynicism.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the 30% pay raise granted to our MNAs (which amounts to 45% after three years…), even though they were already the highest-paid provincial legislators in the country and enjoyed a particularly generous pension plan. But Mr. Legault had to placate the discontented members of the caucus after the third link project was scrapped, and one CAQ member complained that he didn’t see his mother often enough. Mr. Legault even had the nerve to say that it took “courage” to grant the unwarranted raise.

I won’t be praising François Legault for spending millions to bring in a hockey team to play two exhibition games in Québec City and announce almost at the same time that there wasn’t enough money for food banks, one of which is a stone’s throw away from the Vidéotron Centre, where the games would be played. One line for tickets, the other for food donations. This was all the more inept given that exhibition games were played elsewhere without any subsidies and that the NHL even scheduled regular-season games in Europe. But can we expect from a fanboy premier who appointed a minister responsible for bringing back the Nordiques?

I won’t be praising François Legault for reneging on his promise to reform the electoral system to make our democracy more representative and fairer to voters—a solemn commitment made with representatives from the other opposition parties, backed by photos and signatures. “You can count on us,” the CAQ leader had said at the time. Just like the rest.

I won’t be praising François Legault for having sabotaged more than 40 years of democratic consensus by butchering the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms under a gag order. Before the CAQ’s arrival, Quebec’s MNAs managed to patiently evolve our charter through near-unanimous votes—always to add rights, never to remove them. This spring, Quebec could set a world premiere by adopting a constitution that will leave its citizens with fewer rights, rather than guaranteeing them.

I won’t be praising François Legault for using Quebecers from elsewhere as electoral fuel, or for describing as “suicidal” an immigration threshold that his own government ultimately exceeded anyway, or for repeatedly stoking identity-based fears, and for comparing Quebec—where nearly 94% of the population speaks French—to Louisiana, where French is practically extinct.

I won’t be praising François Legault for having deliberately and repeatedly trampled on the rights of religious minorities, without ever demonstrating that the Quebec women targeted had caused a single problem. At first, it was people “in positions of authority.” Today, it is cafeteria workers and library volunteers. A government should protect its minorities and its most vulnerable citizens, not turn them into political cannon fodder.

I won’t be praising François Legault in particular for the monstrous hypocrisy that consisted of portraying Quebec women wearing a hijab as an immediate danger to our children, yet tolerating their continued presence for decades via a grandfather clause, provided they do not change jobs. Was this an urgent matter or not? If you still believed there was a legitimate justification behind all this, this should dispel your last doubts.

I won’t be praising François Legault for having repeatedly cast doubt on the loyalty and love for Quebec of those who held different views from his own and who felt it necessary to contradict or criticize him. Or for having taken aim, in turn, at Anglophones, immigrants, “woke” people, Montrealers, mayors, journalists, and others, depending on who was the convenient enemy of the day. Or for repeatedly pitting us against one another, when his own primary duty was to unite us.

When you end up playing politics against just about everyone, it should raise a flag. Mr. Legault, for his part, was dreaming of a third term, even when most Quebecers wanted him out.

François Legault’s greatest merit is having been there when we were at our worst. It happened by chance, amid the COVID-19 crisis. The premier struck the right tone, which made him a sort of benevolent uncle to the nation.

But the decisions made by his government did not stand up to rigorous analysis. Over the course of numerous press conferences where the focus was mostly on his reassuring tone, it quickly became evident that Mr. Legault did not understand what was happening, misinterpreted the numbers and trends, and generally spoke nonsense. On at least 20 occasions, the premier told us that “it was under control.” This was almost always false.

Quebec is not the only place where the pandemic has hit hard, but some countries, proactive and at the forefront, have fared better. Quebec had the luxury of being at the tail end of every wave. Instead of learning from others’ experiences, our leaders generally sat on their hands longer, and the bulk of our government’s response consisted of repeatedly locking down and reopening, rather than using all the tools at our disposal and demonstrating audacity and imagination.

And then, there’s this picture, taken in January 2021 while dozens of Quebecers were dying every day, our hospitals were at breaking point, and it was clear that our leaders had screwed up big time once again. All that despite the experience of the previous spring and the multiple warning signs coming from Europe, elsewhere in Canada, and even from Quebec throughout the fall.

But Mr. Legault was somewhere else, in his own head.

In hindsight, it remains staggering to see how, after all his years in politics, Mr. Legault remains with such a limited and superficial grasp of the key factors shaping public policy.

He has made a habit of governing by intuition and slogans, rather than promoting the best policies and fostering the imagination and intellectual curiosity needed to develop and implement them.

Even today, he still defends the disastrous economic interventionism that marked his years in power and calls on his successors to double down. How many billions should have had to be wasted to snap him out of his denial?

Imagine what a competent CAQ government could have achieved, with a premier and ministers who had done their homework before coming to power, instead of the band of ideologues and disorganized populists who have steered Quebec for the past seven years?

Imagine if François Legault had truly set aside the national question, as he initially intended to do, and channelled all government action toward education, health care, improving family policy, elderly care, the environment, the transition to a society where we will have to provide more services with fewer hands, upgrading and maintaining our infrastructure, researching and actively identifying best practices from around the world, revitalizing our democracy, and implementing optimistic, unifying policies to promote the French language—and so on—rather than wasting so much time and energy brandishing bogeymen about the impending disappearance of the francophones or the supposed attacks on “our” values?

Imagine if he had fully committed to public transit as a sustainable solution to congestion and endless road expansion, instead of foolishly fighting with two successive mayors of his own capital over the modern public transit system Québec City still lacks?

Imagine if the former Health Minister that Mr. Legault knew what he was doing. That, instead of foolishly promising to reduce emergency room wait times to 90 minutes, he had realized that he was comparing Quebec to countries that have more doctors, more hospital beds, better incentives for their health-care facilities, better tools, and better policies—and acted accordingly.

Instead of having wasted eight years, we would be starting to see results. We could be hoping that things are improving, which would encourage everyone to pursue their efforts and sacrifices toward a common, worthy, inspiring goal. Instead, we find ourselves with almost everything still left to do, and less time and resources than we had.

You’re going to tell me that the Liberals didn’t do any better before? You’re not wrong. I wouldn’t have paid any more tribute to Jean Charest for his lost decade in power. But, with hindsight, experience, evaluation, and learning from mistakes, I was hoping for better this time.

During the Charest decade, Quebec stood still; during Legault’s eight years, Quebec sank deeper.

+++++++

Leading a state, a nation, is not a reward or a prize, but a heavy burden.

Founding a party and bringing it to power is certainly an achievement on a personal level and in terms of partisan politics. But it is by no means a sign of a society’s progress or an improvement in the lives of those who inhabit it. In fact, history has shown that the opposite is often true.

The near-unanimity in the tributes paid to a man who will go down as the worst premier in our modern political history reveals an uncomfortable closeness between politics and the media, or at the very least of a political culture that values persistence—even in mediocrity—more than results.

I know, we’re not supposed to say that when a politician is making his final exit. But if not now, when?

The CAQ is a meteorite that has streaked across our political sky before crashing and likely disappearing next fall, but not without causing a lot of damage.

As François Legault prepares to step down, and with elections just a few months away, it is necessary to remind ourselves that we no longer need this kind of politician, that we’d be better off without them, and that Quebecers of all stripes and origins deserve better.

Nothing defines short-sightedness and a lack of political imagination more than this 2022 CAQ campaign ad, in which an uneducated elderly woman was adamant that “no one could have done better.”

It is with this mix of arrogance, unabashed ignorance, and refusal to even acknowledge obvious missteps and blatant mistakes that we have been governed for eight years. And we’re supposed to say thanks on top of that?

It may have been “the greatest honour” for François Legault to have been premier. But if I were in his shoes, I would leave with my head bowed, ashamed of having squandered such an opportunity to improve the lives of millions of fellow Quebecers.

The length of a political commitment does not make up for poor stewardship.

Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Legault, and whatever you do, please don’t come back.

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This text is 2,869 words long, which is roughly twelve pages of a book. My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space.

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