Inside the Parti Québécois’ campaign, where smiles are in short supply

LONGUEUIL, QC — “Paul is Paul. I’ve already told him to laugh from time to time,” said one seasoned Parti Québécois veteran about leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.

Au naturel, St-Pierre Plamondon has a resting serious face. It is reportedly a challenge for photographers, who struggle to snap a picture of him with a smile on his face when he is being questioned by reporters or when he is meeting folks in the street.

St-Pierre Plamondon likes to repeat that he has been the PQ leader for six years now and people are starting to know his style. But even after all this time, his team has to remind him to slow down to talk to people and ask them what their names are.

When another PQ veteran was asked whether he thinks the leader should smile more, he said: “I think you’ve got a damn good idea. You should tell him!”

The stakes are high for the PQ as they hope to form government on Oct. 5. But with a large proportion of Quebec voters who remain undecided, many could decide on a whim to support one party or another based on their impressions of the leader.

At the time of National Post’s visit, days before the first debates, the public itinerary of the PQ leader is sparse. His team is stationed near Montreal for several days, but lots of that time is spent preparing for debates and working on upcoming announcements.

St-Pierre Plamondon said he is comfortable with not being everywhere at once. “I’m not pretending I’m fighting for my life. I’m pretending I’m running a good campaign,” he said when National Post asked him if the slow pace of the campaign was intentional.

He said he is running the same style of campaign as he did in 2022, when he only managed to elect three members at the National Assembly including himself.

“It’s exactly the same leader with the same approach. So, it’s consistency rather than trying to build your campaign based on what the other campaigns are doing,” he said.

On Friday morning, St-Pierre Plamondon was in Longueuil, on Montreal’s south shore, to present his plan to cut in half provincial taxes on gas for one year.

Once he was done, Josée Duchesne, a local resident passing nearby, stopped him to say she identifies as a sovereigntist and congratulated him on the PQ’s “blue book” which fleshes out their vision of what an independent Quebec would look like.

“Unfortunately, I won’t be voting for you,” she said.

Duchesne said she cannot support the PQ this time around because of St-Pierre Plamondon’s promise to abolish Santé Québec, the government corporation responsible for health and social services across the province, where she works.

Its abolition is estimated to save the province $40 to $100 million each year, a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $70 billion spent on health care this year.

Duchesne said, despite the criticism of Santé Québec which the PQ considers to be a bloated bureaucracy, she urged St-Pierre Plamondon to reconsider scrapping the recent structure if he forms power, arguing it would be “catastrophic” if he does.

“You are entitled to your opinion, but obviously, you work for Santé Québec,” he said.

St-Pierre Plamondon insisted his position on the matter would not change, leaving Duchesne scratching her head, wondering who she will be voting for in the upcoming election.

Even when meeting stakeholders, the PQ leader struggles to turn on the charm.

As he entered the room to meet with representatives of the Union des producteurs agricoles, the most influential agricultural lobby in the province, St-Pierre Plamondon shook a few hands before briskly addressing the others at the back of the room.

“I won’t greet everyone individually because my time is limited. But I do greet you all,” he told them before taking place in the front of the room for his speech.

St-Pierre Plamondon reiterated his opposition to the Quebec portion of the Alto high-speed rail project, which is exactly in line with the organization’s position. Everywhere in the building, posters read that the project is a “bad priority” for everyone to see.

In front of a crowd that needed no convincing to oppose the Alto project, the PQ leader insisted that his party’s position was the right one all along and lambasted commentators who said he was shooting himself in the foot by opposing the project.

But farmers had other questions for the aspiring premier. They asked about a variety of subjects, including agriculture in remote areas or mental health issues.

At times, St-Pierre Plamondon seemed to take issue with some of the questioning, saying that he hadn’t arrived at the meeting “empty-handed” or that the PQ did not have as many resources as the other parties to come up with all their answers.

St-Pierre Plamondon is fully aware that he is sometimes seen as angry or abrasive. But he thinks that characterization is unfair.

In a recent podcast, the PQ leader attributed the disconnect to a cultural divide. His life has been heavily influenced by his travels in Denmark, where he moved at the age of 17 to live with a Lutheran family, and often refers to the Scandinavian way of life.

“It’s true that, having travelled, I sometimes feel a bit out of sync,” he candidly admitted to host Marie-Claude Barrette on “Ouvre ton jeu en mode électoral.”

Minutes after his curt exchange with Duchesne, the PQ leader’s team announced that he was pulling out the local debate in his riding of Camille-Laurin, in the east end of Montreal, Friday evening. “It’s not a local debate anymore,” they argued.

The reason? Québec solidaire candidate René Gauvreau, who is running against St-Pierre Plamondon, had health issues so he had to be replaced with Alexandre Boulerice, who recently resigned as NDP MP to run for the provincial socialist party.

In turn, the PQ sent Catherine Gentilcore, the energetic and bubbly PQ member of the National Assembly from Terrebonne who has been filling in for the party for various debates in the Montreal area since the start of the campaign.

“It’s not an abnormal practice at all,” St-Pierre Plamondon said to justify his reaction.

The community groups organizing the event put out a press release decrying St-Pierre Plamondon’s decision to pull out of the debate at the last moment and that it was a missed opportunity for voters who wanted to hear him about the riding’s local issues.

Annick, a resident of the riding who was at the debate and declined to provide her last name, said she was disappointed to not see St-Pierre Plamondon that evening, but that Gentilcore did a good job filling in for the PQ leader.

Instead of the debate, St-Pierre Plamondon opted to go to a beer festival in Repentigny, the type of Montreal suburb that the PQ needs to win to form government.

There, beer in hand, the PQ leader started to smile again.

As he traveled through the festive crowd with his candidate Nicolas Girard, they were greeted by bright faces and occasional cheers to make Quebec a country.

Photographers were not struggling anymore to snap pictures of St-Pierre Plamondon with a smile on his face when went on stage to distribute beers to the crowd next to the mayor of Repentigny, Nicolas Dufour, a former Bloc Québécois MP from 2008 to 2011.

The incumbent, Coalition Avenir Québec’s Pascale Déry, said she was flattered to see the PQ leader in her riding once again during the campaign.

The Qc125 website projects a close race between the PQ and the CAQ in Repentigny.

Despite these electoral battles to come, the PQ campaign is advancing at a cumbersome pace compared to its main competitors. St-Pierre Plamondon has denied it is due to budgetary constraints.

In the following days, St-Pierre Plamondon will be keeping an even lower profile to prepare for the debates. He plans to let his economic team present his party’s financial framework.

The first debate will take place on Tuesday at TVA, then on Wednesday with Noovo, and the last one with be with Radio-Canada on September 23.

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.