He’s the most-liked leader Quebec has had in decades, but it took years to get his brand of paternal populism just right – and to persuade voters to buy it, as they seem poised to do again on Oct. 3
He had quit the Parti Québécois and its fading dream of independence. His comfortable life of tennis and lunches on Laurier Ave. in the posh francophone enclave of Outremont was wearing thin.
The historian Éric Bédard was one of them. He had worked as a speechwriter for Mr. Legault in his PQ days, and still nurtured the sovereigntist flame. Since winning a majority government in 2018, he has soared to unprecedented approval ratings and built his party into a political machine expected to easily win theHe is not only the best-liked Premier in a generation, but the most consequential.
Young François’s upbringing in the Montreal suburb of Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue did nothing to disabuse him of the belief that the Québécois had a distinct destiny. Air Transat's Philippe Sureau and Jean-Marc Eustache leave the airline's annual general meeting in Toronto in 2007.While working for the struggling airline Quebecair in the mid-1980s, he met two other hard-driving young businessmen and decided to start the company that would become Air Transat. The partners were impressed by Mr. Legault’s facility with numbers – “He was a boy who could count,” said Philippe Sureau, one of the co-founders – and by his cocksure ambition.
When the company was targeted by a hostile takeover attempt in the 1990s, it was the Caisse de dépôt et placement, a public pension fund and a key private equity backer for Quebec Inc., that helped design a poison-pill defence. At least since scandalizing the anglo salarymen with his choice of commuter-train newspaper, Mr. Legault had been drawn to the sovereigntist movement. He held his convictions close to his chest while running Transat – Mr. Sureau says he had no idea how Mr. Legault voted in their years working together – but when politics came calling, there was no question of whose colours he would wear.
The boy who could count was not intimidated by the financial consequences of Quebec independence, as some of his comrades were. He authored a prospective Year One budget for a sovereign Quebec, and was impatient for a third referendum, according to several former colleagues. One recurring issue that Mr. Legault dismissed on those grounds was the “reasonable accommodation” of religious minorities. Some parties, notably the conservative Action démocratique du Québec , won support by calling for restrictions on religious practices in the name of secularism.
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