Policy and politics

On Montreal's south shore, a celebration of unblocking

Fréchette and Carney in Longueuil, Tuesday. Photo: PW

[Tickets are still available for The Paul Wells Road Show — Toronto! I promise you it’s not sold out yet. Coming Saturday, June 20 at Hugh’s Room Live in Toronto. Tickets are available for purchase at this link. Come see me in person. I’ll have a stellar list of guests, including the mayor, the newspaper editor, the rapper, the playwright, and the guitar-slinging kid. After three sold-out shows in Ottawa and one in Vancouver, this will be my first live Paul Wells Show event in Toronto. Come on out. Tell some friends.]

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On Monday afternoon the offices of Prime Minister Mark Carney and Quebec premier Christine Fréchette announced their bosses’ itineraries for Tuesday. Turns out their paths would intersect at a transit-system bus garage in Longueuil, across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. I cancelled my appointments and hopped in the car.

The body language is always intense when prime ministers and Quebec premiers share a stage. Jean Chrétien and Bernard Landry met as teenagers studying at the Séminaire de Joliette in the 1950s. Half a century later their relationship hadn’t improved, but they still made the odd announcement together. Each doing politics past the other, as it were. Stephen Harper and Jean Charest sat in rival Progressive Conservative and Reform caucuses in the 1990s. A decade later Harper thought they should be allies but he couldn’t stand Charest’s tendency to think for himself. Justin Trudeau tried to help Philippe Couillard, clumsily, and wound up working with François Legault for five years. `

Fréchette has been premier for six weeks. She might not be premier in five months. She inherited the leadership of the Coalition Avenir Québec from its founding leader, François Legault, in April. She’s been so impressive she’s lifted the flatlining CAQ from zero seats in the Qc125 polling projection, where they had languished all year, all the way to nine. She’ll need to do better to save her party. Honestly I wouldn’t bet on any particular outcome. The PQ leader hasn’t worn well, the Liberal leader can’t seem to make an impression. The polls are bouncing around, listlessly. If “None of the above” were fielding candidates, they’d win in a landslide.

Now here were Fréchette and Carney in a bus station, and Carney had brought $10 billion for infrastructure over 10 years. “One of the largest infrastructure investments in Québec’s history,” the federal press release said. Most of the money would come from the Canada Public Transit Fund, which Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland announced every several months from 2021 to 2024. Depending how you count these things, this was therefore either the second favour Freeland ever did for Carney or, through the miracle of time travel, the first.

Federal money under the CPTF is disbursed upon the conclusion of negotiation with provinces over the terms. Quebec was the last province that hadn’t agreed on terms. Whatever province you live in that isn’t Quebec, your premier already cut a deal with the Ottawa Liberals for the money. But Trudeau and Legault never managed it. Finally, somebody in the new governments of Carney and Fréchette hit on a formula that just might work:

(1) The federal government would send the money.

(2) The Quebec government would spend it.

Mazel tov. The announcement required various concessions to provincial autonomy. Carney said the money “might” go to this or that metro line or tramway. Fréchette will make announcements later. The announced details amount to “You’ll see.”

Paul St.-Pierre Plamondon, the Parti Québécois leader, said in Quebec City before the announcement that Carney was releasing the funding to take the wind out of the PQ’s sails. PSPP probably thinks Carly Simon wrote a song about him. Back to Qc125: the PQ’s sails have been deflating since December, though their support seems to have bottomed out at a level that would still make them competitive to govern.

I wondered: if Carney does want to play politics, why would he help Fréchette? Every federal Liberal in Quebec hopes Charles Milliard, the amiable but unmemorable leader of the province’s Liberal party, to be premier. Yet Carney spent the afternoon handing Milliard’s rival a win.

I thought I would put that question to Carney. Your activist base in Quebec wants you to help the other guy. How do you reconcile that with your day job? In the end I decided this was a perish-the-thought question, the kind that any leader would answer by denying the premise. That’s the answer a colleague got when he asked whether Carney was trying to block the PQ.

“This is policy,” Carney said. “This is the governments coming together to serve the people we serve. It’s not a political calculation at all.” Perish the thought.

The question I ended up asking was simpler. In Ottawa before making his way to Montreal, Carney took questions from reporters. One asked: What unblocked between the Trudeau-Legault standoff and the Carney-Fréchette agreement. Carney answered: “We unblocked.” I asked: What needed unblocking? What did unblocking entail? And, since Fréchette said twice that Quebec was getting more than its population share of the transit money, who would get less?

I didn’t understand a word of Carney’s answer. Try for yourself: mine is the second question in this video, and some readers will be relieved to hear it’s in English. After the event, Carney came up to me and added to his answer: Transit funding. Quebec has more public transit ridership than most provinces, so it gets more transit funding. All around us, electric Longueuil buses sat waiting to be put to work.