The new legislature convenes for the first time on Tuesday, and the Coalition Avenir Québec enters the session with the province's largest parliamentary majority in decades.
QUEBEC — It’s time to get back to the business of governing.
Work at the National Assembly will resume Tuesday as a brand new legislature, the 43rd in Quebec history, convenes for the first time since the Oct. 3 election.
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The session will be brief, just eight days in total, before MNAs return to working in their ridings and take the holidays many missed in the seemingly endless election pre-campaign. The 125 MNAs will sit through Dec. 9.
A lot has changed since June. For one thing, the already big Coalition Avenir Québec caucus got even bigger as a result of its stunning election win. The CAQ ranks have swelled from 76 MNAs before the election to 90, including François Legault, who resumes his job as Quebec’s 32nd premier.
It is the biggest majority in decades, coming close to Robert Bourassa’s 92-seat win of 1989. It’s so big that creating the cabinet was a struggle for Legault, who admits he had too many names to choose from. On Oct. 20, he announced the creation of a 30-member cabinet, one of the largest in recent history.
It is not well known, but Legault has set a record of his own. At age 65, he is now the dean of the legislature. As of the house’s dissolution in June, he has held a seat for a total of 20 years, six months and 19 days, National Assembly researchers say.
Normally, it is the elder statesperson of the house who would oversee the election of the new speaker — which will be the first order of business Tuesday — but Legault is exempt from the task because of his position.
Instead, the job will fall to the next-most senior person in the line who qualifies, and that is Drummond—Bois-Francs MNA Sébastien Schneeberger.
Set to happen at about 2 p.m. Tuesday, it promises to not be much of an election. The CAQ has already given the nod to Montarville MNA Nathalie Roy as its choice of a replacement for François Paradis, who did not seek re-election.
The former CAQ minister for culture and communications, Roy will have to stay neutral and oversee the cut-and-thrust of daily question period.
Once she is in place, activities at the house will take off, starting with an inaugural address by Legault at 3 p.m. Wednesday in which he will outline priorities for his new mandate. Before he speaks, the lieutenant-governor will make brief remarks as well.
This will be Legault’s third inaugural speech. He delivered his first on Nov. 27, 2018, after the election that brought the CAQ to power for the first time. He delivered a second one Oct. 19, 2021 when he wanted to reboot his administration.
Legault is expected to focus on items his government was unable to act on in its first mandate, which was marked by about two years of managing the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CAQ government is promising to table three significant pieces of legislation before the Christmas recess.
The first bill, authored by Finance Minister Eric Girard, will slap a three per cent ceiling on increases in government fees such as university tuition and daycare rates. Quebec has already put a ceiling, via regulation, on such fees as car licences and registration, plus room rental rates in CHSLDs.
The second bill will aim to put in place the same three per cent ceiling on increases in Hydro-Québec power rates.
Finally, TVA reported Friday that after weeks of debate over the requirement that MNAs swear an oath of allegiance to King Charles III, Jean-François Roberge, the minister responsible for democratic institutions, will table legislation to abolish the oath, which many MNAs find archaic.
Which raises the big question. Despite their reluctance, nearly all the MNAs in the legislature have taken the oath, which they are required to do before legally assuming their seats. But there are holdouts: the three Parti Québécois MNAs — Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, Joël Arseneau and Pascal Bérubé.
As of Sunday, the three were still refusing to take the oath, which means they would be in limbo as the session starts. The question is whether they will try to enter the blue room anyway Tuesday.
Meeting for an election post-mortem Sunday in Drummondville, St-Pierre Plamondon was sticking to his stand on the oath, even if there is a risk the three MNAs will not be allowed to enter the blue room. He would not say what they will do.
This debate dovetails with increasing pressure on the CAQ government to relaunch electoral reforms, which it started to do with Bill 39 but shelved midway through its first mandate. Although Legault has said it is a subject only a few intellectuals are interested in, polls show support for change has grown after this fall’s election.
On Tuesday, while MNAs convene indoors, a protest calling for reform will be taking place outside. The organizers, Mobilisation citoyenne pour une réforme du mode de scrutin, said the electoral distortions revealed in October are real.
Another protest will take place at about the same time — this one against the monarchy, organized by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste.
The other highlight of the session will come Dec. 8, when Girard presents the fall economic update, or mini-budget. On Friday, Revenue Quebec announced cheques of $400 to $600 to help Quebecers fight inflation, promised by the CAQ in the election campaign, will start going out on the first week of December.
The new session also represents a serious reality check for the three opposition parties. There are now only 35 opposition MNAs to take on 90 CAQ players.
The Liberals saw their total number of seats dwindle to 21 in the election, only to lose two more in Dominique Anglade’s leadership debacle and her subsequent resignation.
Not only is Anglade gone, the Liberal MNA at the heart of a dispute with her, Vaudreuil’s Marie-Claude Nichols, will sit as an independent. That means the Liberals are down to 19 seats, yet they have the heavy responsibility of the role of official opposition.
“I have learned that in politics, often we can harm ourselves,” interim Liberal leader Marc Tanguay said last week as he struggled to get the party back on the rails for the session. “We can miss the real objective. We can get distracted, which is what happened with (the debate) over the third deputy speaker’s position.”
Québec solidaire has its own kind of election hangover. Although it ran the biggest, most expensive campaign in its history, the party wound up with only one more seat, for a total of 11.
Party co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois put a positive spin on QS’s status last week at the end of a caucus. He said QS will stay true to its values, with a focus in the new session on pressuring the government to help ordinary people fight inflation.
“The QS caucus will speak for all the people in Quebec who, right now, are having trouble making ends meet,” Nadeau-Dubois said Wednesday.
The fall to Earth has been toughest for the once-powerful PQ, which again saw its seat total drop, from seven to three. Technically it no longer qualifies for party status in the legislature, which requires either 12 MNAs or 20 per cent of the vote.
Nevertheless, the PQ argued that with 14.6 per cent of the popular vote, it should be granted status.
On Friday, after weeks of negotiating with the bigger parties, the PQ signed on to a deal that represents much less than it wanted.
The party asked for an $800,000 operating budget to hire researchers and staff. It settled for $570,000. It wanted to ask one of the nine questions allowed daily from the opposition parties. It settled for seven per cycle, which means in reality two a week.
The negotiations only reinforced existing bitterness between the PQ and QS, which did get party status.
“We could not risk losing more budget than what was proposed,” a furious St-Pierre Plamondon wrote on Facebook, as the party leader defended his decision to accept the lowball offer.
The CAQ, however, insists it wants to work together with the opposition parties.
“I am in a good mindset and I want to make parliament work,” CAQ house leader Simon Jolin-Barrette said in an interview. “We need the opposition parties to pass a lot of bills. We are all working for Quebecers, so we need a good atmosphere.”
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