Quebec Premier François Legault responds to a question during a news conference at the legislature, in Quebec City, on Feb. 16, 2021.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
When Quebec Premier François Legault took the podium recently for one of his regular press conferences, he delivered a bit of everything that has made him the most dominant force in Canadian provincial politics.
There was a mixture of reassuring optimism and bracing caution about COVID-19 (”We see that the situation is getting better … but not enough.”)
He flashed his folksy charm by teasing a reporter about the man’s hairline before breaking into a sheepish schoolboy grin.
His staunch, albeit realistic, Quebec nationalism was also on display, as was his tendency to deflect criticism, this time on the province’s reluctance to perform rapid tests.
All the elements that have allowed Quebec’s leader to defy political gravity were there; and he has needed every one of them in the past year. Despite having arguably the country’s worst pandemic record – by far the highest death toll, paired with some of the most prolonged lockdown measures – Mr. Legault remains the most popular premier in Canada, with an approval rating above 60 per cent as recently as December.
In a Leger poll last month, at least three-quarters of Quebeckers pronounced themselves satisfied with the measures put in place to fight COVID-19 by their provincial government, more than any other province west of Quebec.
That has left his opponents throwing up their hands, and politics watchers looking for answers.
“How to explain the François Legault Phenomenon?” asked journalist Josée Legault (no relation) in a recent column for Le Journal de Montréal, the province’s most popular newspaper.
Explanations range from good luck to sheer skill, and tend to include a heavy dose of Quebec’s unique political culture.
For example, the severity of the crisis facing Quebec has worked to the advantage of the Premier’s poll numbers in a way. More than 10,000 Quebeckers have died of COVID-19, and hospitals have teetered on the brink of their capacity for months, leading to a painful lockdown in much of the province, including Canada’s only nighttime curfew.
But where that double blow might have hurt many leaders, it inspired a sense of national solidarity in Quebeckers that benefited Mr. Legault, said Guy Lachapelle, a professor of political science at Concordia University. That impulse to “rally around the flag” was especially strong in the early days of the pandemic, when Mr. Legault skillfully marshalled it into personal support; in March, the Premier’s approval rating shot up to an astonishing 94 per cent in one Leger poll.
“When he said at the beginning that this is the battle of our lives, people believed him,” Mr. Lachapelle said.
When the situation on the ground began to unravel – the province’s long-term care sector was devastated by the virus in the spring, leaving thousands of residents dead – Mr. Legault’s poll numbers dipped, but never crashed to earth. The Premier’s innate political skill seemed to carry him through.
Mr. Legault, elected with a comfortable majority in 2018, has an everyman style that many in the province appreciate. In a recent video to inaugurate this year’s Carnaval de Québec, the Premier donned the famous sash of the Bonhomme mascot and reminisced about playing drums in the festival’s parade as a boy – a scene hard to imagine many of his more formal predecessors replicating.
“There’s a very down-to-earth quality to his French, his manner, his vocabulary,” said Graham Fraser, Canada’s former commissioner of official languages and a long-time political journalist before that. “He’s candid. He talks like ordinary people.”
The political base of his party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, resides mainly in the province’s heavily French-speaking rural regions, mirroring the electoral map crafted by the powerhouse Union Nationale of Maurice Duplessis in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, Mr. Fraser noted. That dynasty was built on conservative nationalism, with an emphasis on protecting Quebec’s identity and autonomy, the same ideological brew Mr. Legault offers.
In an essay comparing Duplessis and the current Premier, published shortly before the pandemic, Mr. Fraser argued that the parallels between the men also include targeting religious minorities. Mr. Legault’s government barred many public-sector workers from wearing religious symbols on the job with its Laicity Act, a move decried by human-rights and civil-liberties groups but supported by a majority of Quebeckers.
Mr. Legault, meanwhile, shares the raw political gifts that undergirded the power of a man known to Quebeckers of the day simply as “the Boss,” Mr. Fraser said. “He has some of the same shrewd, earthy pragmatism that Duplessis had.”
A former chief executive of Air Transat and a senior Parti Québécois cabinet minister, Mr. Legault has spent years building an image as a hard-headed pragmatist with the instincts of a businessman. That reputation has served him well during the pandemic, said Louis Aucoin, a veteran Montreal-based communication strategist. Because voters expect him to be pragmatic, they are more likely to view his handling of the pandemic through that lens, Mr. Aucoin said. “That’s a storytelling success.”
Despite a series of controversies over his pandemic management, from an aggressive school reopening push last fall to catastrophic understaffing in long-term care homes, the Premier has also benefited from a weak opposition that has failed to take advantage of the government’s blunders. Both the Liberals and the PQ had new leaders installed during the pandemic who have failed to make much of an impression on the public.
The absence of effective opposition has helped Mr. Legault pass the buck for the province’s failures, Mr. Aucoin argued. The government has blamed outside actors for everything from shortages of personal protective equipment (China) to slow vaccine rollouts (Ottawa) to rising cases (ordinary citizens), allowing the Premier to present himself as a victim of circumstance. “Quebeckers feel solidarity with a victim,” he said.
For Mr. Legault to cast himself in that role isn’t particularly credible, given how much control the Premier has over the running of the province.
But, Mr. Aucoin said, “Storytelling, to work, doesn’t have to be true.”
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