Accused of leading a “worn” government, François Legault promises once again that he will be a candidate in the next elections.
“I guarantee you that I will be the leader of the CAQ in 2026 for the electoral campaign,” the Prime Minister reiterated Tuesday, as unfavorable polls accumulate. Even more, the opposition parties are brandishing the quiet end of the session at the National Assembly to portray François Legault as a “worn out” politician and “out of ideas”.
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The weeks leading up to the holiday season are generally very busy in Parliament. MPs are usually forced to sit until the evening to advance the numerous bills that must be passed before elected officials leave for their constituencies.
But that’s not the case this year. “There is little happening in the National Assembly. I have been a member of parliament for six years, and at the end of the session, there are so few committees running, so few bills, I have never seen that,” notes Ruba Ghazal, who replaces Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois in his role as parliamentary leader of Québec solidaire during his parental leave.
However, there is currently no shortage of problems in society, she insists. Housing crisis, homelessness crisis, sick people waiting for surgery, she illustrates.
“A lot of things are going wrong and we would have thought that there would be more solutions,” adds Ruba Ghazal. I denounce the fact that they are not putting anything in place. Is it a matter of laziness? Is it because they don’t have any idea for a proposal? Well, we have solutions!”
A government at the end of its regime
The observation is the same among the liberals. Interim leader Marc Tanguay did not fail to point out that the Legault government has not even moved forward with its famous legislative text on the energy future of Quebec, tabled with great fanfare by former minister Pierre Fitzgibbon.
“It is a government which is running out of ideas, which is at its wits’ end, a worn-out government, which showed us more vigor in the first years,” says the liberal.
According to Marc Tanguay, we have simply arrived “at the end of the logic of François Legault and the CAQ who had promised us (…) sea and world, then who delivered nothing”. One more sign that this government is at the end of its regime.
Which even makes the Parti Québécois say that the deputies would have ample time to study their bill to force the Director General of Elections of Quebec (DGEQ) to disclose the documents studied by the Grenier commission on the financing of the “camp” no” during the 1995 referendum.
“We hope that the leader of the government will give us a sign and there would be plenty of room to do so by the end of the week,” argued PQ leader Joël Arseneau.
Legault, the man for the job
The government’s parliamentary leader, Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, argued that 18 bills have nevertheless been adopted since September. “Wait for the start of the next session, I’ll have lots of ideas!” he joked in the press scrum.
And according to him, there is no doubt that François Legault is the man for the job and must stay in politics. “He is the most competent person to occupy this position,” he said.
