Winter 2024 session report: what caught our attention

While the federal government announced in the fall its intention to maintain the 500,000 newcomer threshold by 2025, the issue of limiting immigration thresholds was back on the media agenda in January, when the Parti Québécois made it the topic of its pre-session caucus. Its angle: to place the debate around immigration targets in relation to housing and service capacity. A snowball effect ensued, with the other parties, including the government, recognizing that record numbers of temporary immigrants (temporary workers, foreign students and asylum seekers) were putting undue pressure on government services. Minister Christine Fréchette has made this a key issue with the federal government, calling for financial compensation that has resulted in a mixed proposal in recent days. Immigration has remained a hot topic between the two levels of government for months, with Premier Legault even brandishing the long-hated word: sectoral referendum. It's a safe bet that there's still plenty of ink to be spilled on this issue.

Back in January, the Parti Québécois (PQ) announced its intention to put the issue of screen time among young people at the heart of the political agenda. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (PSPP), alarmed by the effects of overexposure to screens, proposed concrete measures, including a ban on cell phones in schools and a parliamentary commission. Despite initial rejection by the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), the debate has gained momentum, with increasing pressure on the government to act coming from its own youth wing, which succeeded in pushing the issue through at the May general council. Admittedly, the PQ has succeeded in raising public awareness and stimulating a much-needed debate, which could lead to concrete legislative measures in the near future.

The month of March will have been marked by a Quebec budget deficit of 11 M$, a record deficit for the CAQ government, more accustomed to balanced budgets or surpluses since coming to power in 2018. It has to be said, however, that the perfect storm has descended upon the government: rising interest rates and borrowing costs, declining economic activity and tax revenues, a housing crisis, urgent infrastructure needs. Departments and interest groups accustomed to seeing many of their requests accepted in recent years have experienced the new reality as a cold shower. The Liberal Party, by daring to (re)make itself the party of budgetary rigor, tried to gain the upper hand in public opinion and give the CAQ a few lessons in economics and public finance. Does this explain their resurgence in the polls? The next few months will tell.

The spring session was an opportunity for the Coalition Avenir Québec to sound the death knell for two nationalist projects: the Panier Bleu, a local purchasing platform set up during the pandemic and which met with mixed success, and the Espaces bleus, which was to host a museum component highlighting the history of its region inside renovated heritage buildings. While some saw this as an opportunity to pull the plug on projects that had become financial sinkholes, others saw it as a crumbling of the CAQ's powder-blue veneer, especially when it came to encouraging local purchasing. In the case of Les Espaces bleus, Minister Mathieu Lacombe decided to pull the plug on the project in the face of soaring renovation costs. Instead, the Minister and the Premier announced that the Espace bleu in Quebec City, the sole survivor of the project, would take the form of a National History Museum.

The month of April was marked by Franco-Quebec news. While the Minister of Culture, Mathieu Lacombe, was at the Salon du livre de Paris, putting Quebec in the spotlight, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal began a visit to Canada and Quebec. The youngest prime minister in French history resumed a tradition, begun under the Lévesque government, of alternating visits by prime ministers by coming to visit the elected members of the National Assembly. Such a visit had not taken place since 1984. In his speech, the French premier skilfully recalled the ties that unite France and Quebec, stressing the importance of protecting the French language and, above all, secularism. His visit was also marked by a strong stance on the use of screens, giving new impetus to this already hotly debated issue by describing their increasingly preponderant role among young people as a potential health and educational catastrophe.

The appointment of Geneviève Biron, former head of Groupe Biron Santé, as head of Santé Québec marks the ambitious launch of Christian Dubé's major reform. Coming from the private sector, Ms. Biron is embarking on a complex mission: to integrate efficient management practices into the cumbersome bureaucracy of the healthcare network, often described as a mammoth, all in a serene climate, despite the fears expressed loud and clear by the unions. Will such an agency bring about the much-desired changes? Only time will tell.

Preceded by a rarely-seen media flurry, the Trudeau government's budget was characterized by its generosity, despite a $40-billion deficit, and its clientelism, ignoring the division of powers with the provinces. Purchasing power, universal childcare, housing, artificial intelligence, national defense, education funding - the list goes on. For another year, the federal government has loosened the purse strings. The federal Liberals' strategy for balancing the books: make the rich pay. We can't talk about this budget without mentioning the famous withdrawal of the capital gains exemption, decried by many for its effects on even the most modest asset owners. Seeing in this strategy an opportunity to replenish its coffers, the Quebec government quickly followed suit by harmonizing its own rules.

If you go hunting, you lose your place. That's how Denis Coderre must feel after his return from Compostela. While he was one of the few candidates for the Quebec Liberal Party leadership in the winter, the party seems ready for a real race. Those who feared (or not) a new coronation have reason to be reassured, as the list of aspirants has grown from one potential candidate when Denis Coderre left to four prospective candidates. The names of Frédéric Beauchemin, Charles Milliard, Karl Blackburn and, more recently, Antoine Tardif are increasingly being mentioned, which should rekindle the passions of dormant Liberal activists. Recruiting female candidates remains a challenge, given Marwa Rizqy's repeated refusal to enter the race. However, we are hearing more and more voices hoping for a candidacy from the energetic federal Liberal minister François-Philippe Champagne.

On April 29, the resignation of Québec solidaire co-spokesperson Émilise Lessard-Therrien sent shockwaves through activists, plunging the party into an existential crisis. Elected with three votes more than her rival Ruba Ghazal at the November convention, the former Rouyn-Noranda-Témiscamingue MP was only in office for four months. The reasons given: a lack of consideration for her needs as an external and established spokesperson in the regions, and above all, a challenge to the leadership of male co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois (GND) and his inner circle. In a succession of open letters to the media, two camps clashed: the pragmatists and those who wanted the party to "keep its soul", led by former MP Catherine Dorion. Nevertheless, GND pulled off a political tour de force by bringing the debate back to the importance of making QS a power party with a simplified, pragmatic program. This vision will be largely endorsed at the National Council at the end of May, with the adoption of the Saguenay Declaration aimed at making some of the party's historic demands more attractive to the regions. The program will be updated at the next convention in the fall.

After a psychodrama that saw all of Quebec City's mobility issues entrusted to CDPQ Infra, the Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility has revived a project once championed by the PQ, whose aim, in their case, was to depoliticize mobility projects: the creation of an Agence des transports, which in fact turns out to be a carbon copy of Santé Québec. Against a backdrop of stormy negotiations with cities to finance public transit deficits, the Minister has also put her foot down by asserting that public transit management is not a mission for the State. While CDPQ Infra has already unveiled some elements of its report on mobility in Quebec City, proposing to go ahead with a scaled-down tramway project, the agency will certainly not be ready to implement the tramway project. Is the government agility so desired by the CAQ government really hidden in the Agence's miracle formula?

It hasn't been an easy session for the Minister of Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau. With the adoption of her Bill 31, which abolished the right of tenants to assign their leases, and a few clumsy statements that have stuck with her, the Minister had a dual mission this session: find solutions to the housing crisis and become credible. How to achieve this? By using a shrewd political strategy: turn an opponent's request into an opportunity. And this opportunity was to bring to life the spirit of the law introduced by Françoise David at the time. The result was a more humane solution to part of the housing crisis, by imposing a three-year moratorium on evictions and lowering the age of eviction protection for low-income seniors to 65. This measure is seen by many as a major gain, hailed by housing groups, seniors' representatives and Québec solidaire.

The Minister of Seniors, Sonia Bélanger, has come out on top in the last session, tabling an action plan to meet the needs of an aging population, with a focus on home care, in response to repeated requests from seniors' rights groups. Will this plan translate into concrete, rapid action, as the groups have been actively calling for, especially since the end of the pandemic?

Finally tabled at the very end of the parliamentary session, with no chance of adoption before the autumn, super-minister Pierre Fitzgibbon's long-awaited reform aimed at reconciling decarbonization and economic growth by increasing Quebec's energy production capacity has provoked a number of reactions. Many have welcomed the reform as a step in the right direction, while some critics feel that the Minister's preferred approach emphasizes energy exports rather than decarbonizing Quebec.