Have Quebec’s little péquistes been good boys and girls this year? Has Santa Claus ever got a treat for them! While you almost wet your pants laughing at Pierre-Karl Péladeau’s news conference with Pauline Marois early in 2014, what can you do when the irrepressible PKP really does decide he wants to run the Parti Québécois?
If he runs that political party the same way he has run his father’s printing and publishing empire, the PQ will become the P Gone. If anyone asks you how you get to have as many millions as PKP, you answer that you start with a lot more millions your daddy left you.
The one thing that we always respected about René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois was that it was a left-of-centre, socially responsible party. At least it was while Lévesque was alive. The one thing we can assure you about the scion of the Péladeau fortune is that he is no social democrat. If anything, he is probably to the political right of Stephen Harper. He has no time for unions and was never a very warm and fuzzy employer.
You have to admit that the PQ have come down a steep and rocky hill through the leadership of first Jacques Parizeau, then Lucien Bouchard, Bernard Landry and André Boisclair. None achieved the party’s primary purpose. And then Pauline Marois did not so much defeat Jean Charest to become a PQ Premier as she was just there when the voters turned him out of office.
But times have changed in Quebec. The PQ is but a shadow of its former strength. The party of René Lévesque has splintered back to its opposing factions. And with a leader such as Péladeau, the PQ could not form a decent fire department let alone a government.
Megalomania is not a substitute for leadership. Péladeau is not the little engine who thought he could. If he really wants to have his own country, he should take what is left of his papa’s money and buy an uninhabited Pacific atoll.
What is bad about this situation is that Péladeau still owns the dominant news media in Quebec. As poorly as we might regard Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec, they are dominant print media and TVA is the elephant among the television media.
And what makes you think Péladeau wants to fight fair?
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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