"...ways. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois is sanguine but optimistic about the challenges Quebec faces, noting that he emerged from the 2011 student protests that virtually shut down the country as a major political figure from anonymity and that the students were successful in the end, after all, in getting the government to blink on the tuition hikes. Having won the June 1st elections just a day after his 33rd birthday, "GND" is all forward-looking perk, conventionally handsome, fluent in four languages and able to rattle off a laundry list of left-wing priorities for the country now that the hated Maxime Bernier is gone, for now.
Of course, GND elides some strange truths about his home country, possibly by virtue of his and many of his incoming government's considerable youth. When the youngsters who largely staff the democratic-socialist Quebec Solidaire were children in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, Quebec was synonymous with debt crisis, dauntingly high unemployment and considerable brain drain, narrowly avoiding total economic and demographic collapse in the first half of the decade but nonetheless a basket case in a continent full of them. Ironically, Quebec's best economic performance since voting for independence in 1991 and formally achieving it just over a year later in January 1993 was over the last ten years, despite remarkable political dysfunction and a rotating door of Prime Ministers in which the average tenure was less than two years. The chaos of the 1990s and the stagnation under the long premiership of Gilles Duceppe in the 2000s is gone - Quebec's position as a clean energy and electric technology superpower has supercharged its economy since those protests that helped bring Duceppe down, while dramatically reducing unemployment and the national debt.
This is not to say that Quebec is pirouetting from success to success, because it isn't. Her per capita income and gross domestic product is about two-thirds that of neighboring Canada and barely over a third that of the United States - hardly what Quebecois nationalists promised their countrymen in the heyday of 1991. While the biker gangs that ran much of the provincial countryside deep into the 2000s have been largely crushed, organized crime, gun violence and drug use remain higher than in Canada or the Atlantic Union and teenage motherhood is the highest in North America behind the Confederate States.
GND, perhaps unsurprisingly, lays much of the blame at the feet of his immediate predecessor, the bombastic and ultra-orthodox liberal populist Max Bernier, stating that in his four years in charge of Ville-du-Quebec he slashed education and healthcare budgets to the bone, fired hundreds of public servants including experienced police officers, and that his suspension of agricultural supply management has wreaked havoc on rural areas of the province. The elections of June 1st were meant to be a triumph over Bernier's increasingly illiberal and right-wing worldview, but the ADQ - Democratic Action of Quebec - remained the province's largest party, by one seat, over the Quebec Soildaire. It is for that reason that it took eleven days to form a government and that GND's new government is an unwieldy multiparty coalition.
It contains not only the stridently youth-politics, democratic socialist and alter-globalist QS but also the Social Democratic Alliance and Quebecois Party, its fellow travelers on the left, plus the progressive-liberal Democratic Center and the formally nonpartisan Indigenous Voice. This five-party coalition enjoys a healthy, massive majority in the National Assembly after the ADQ's surprise overperformance, landing ahead of three right-wing parties and smaller centrist and regional outfits, but it will initially be unwieldy and, to put it mildly, inexperienced. GND reserved the Finance Ministry to Christine Labrie, a former history teacher who while not regarded as a party firebrand nonetheless has little if any economic background and seems chosen mostly for her essays criticizing capitalist history and remarkably nationalist views on Quebec's time within Canada; at Foreign Affairs one can find Sol Zanetti, who has questioned the continued perpetuation of the Commonwealth of Nations and in a speech advocated not just Quebec but Canada and Ireland withdraw from it and encouraged Scotland to consider exiting the United Kingdom.
Beyond the long idealists around GND, the ASD and PQ will want to exercise a fair deal of influence, particularly as seeing that the former came close to matching QS on seat count and will expect to be treated as an equal rather than junior partner. Guy Caron, the party's leader and an experienced and sober figure, has, perhaps to Zanetti's chagrin, been given the Commonwealth Relations portfolio and ethics advocate Alexandre Boulerice will manage the Public Safety ministry, while Alexandrine Latendresse, an intriguing young reformer, looks to make recommendations around constitutional reform and strengthening Quebec's democracy after it has been battered by four years of Bernierisme and his cronyist policies. Had these kinds of names been put in power during the ASD's government from 2016, it may be that party that was the champion rather than wingman of the ascendant Quebecois left.
Nonetheless, how GND manages these issues will be paramount, and so far he has remained vague but sought to reassure investors and the public alike. The "collectives" of QS govern by consensus and he has promised that the cooperative parties will be consulted as well. His government's immediate priorities are to lower unemployment, perhaps unsurprisingly slash school fees (a matter close to GND's heart) and explore the implementation of a universal dividend from Hydro-Quebec - the state-owned and cash-flush hydroelectric and nuclear utility that underpins much of Quebec's clean-industry dominance - to the country's population as a form of universal basic income..."
- "The Young and the Restless: Quebec's New Prime Minister Takes Over" June 12, 2023
