(Quebec) Prime Minister François Legault legitimized the Quebec Conservative Party (PCQ) by agreeing to meet with it for more than an hour, PCQ leader Éric Duhaime believes.
Posted at 7:24pm
Caroline Plante The Canadian Press
It is clear that the PCQ has a “special status,” Mr Duhaime continued in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “He met me for an hour and a half; he wouldn’t do that with the Culinary Party,” he said.
Mr Legault is holding a series of meetings with opposition party leaders this week to hold discussions. He strove to include Mr Duhaime, who did not elect an MP to the National Assembly.
Moreover, the doors of Parliament have been completely closed to the PCQ since the Oct. 3 elections, in which François Legault’s Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) won a supermajority.
Mr. Duhaime still claims an office in the assembly and permission to hold press conferences there.
Tuesday’s meeting could serve as an argument. “We are all alone who have no elected officials and we were invited, why? Because we represent 530,000 Quebecers.
” [M. Legault] laughed when I told him that. […] He could only nod. […] He couldn’t tell me that we didn’t have special status. He invited me,” Mr. Duhaime said.
According to him, the exercise, “warmly”, “constructively”, can also be repeated “periodically”.
The Conservative leader said he discussed several issues with Mr Legault, from the need to diversify our energy sources to private health, to tax cuts and the Quebec-Lévis third link.
He recalled, for example, that Conservatives support hydrocarbon exploitation and personal health, but oppose the idea of diving into the Generations Fund to finance tax cuts.
Mr Legault would have been “observant”. The previous day, Quebec Solidaire (QS) speaker Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois had praised the head of government for “listening”.
“I think there are two or three things that got him thinking, I saw it in his nonverbal,” Éric Duhaime reported on Tuesday, adding that he would judge Mr Legault “on the results”.
Poilievre and the CCP
The former radio presenter also intends to continue his work within the PCQ, although he admits to speaking to “a friend” of Canada’s Conservative Party (PCC) leader Pierre Poilievre just before the holidays.
Mr. Poilievre is currently on a tour of Quebec to try to increase his party’s popularity.
He will also try to recruit big names within the CAQ for the next elections, political scientist Chantal Hébert reported earlier this week.
Mr. Poilievre denied this information and called it false.
In an interview, Mr. Duhaime ruled out the possibility of ever joining the CCP. “I intend to devote my energies to the Quebec Conservative Party,” he said.