Hard blow for the Parti Québécois: veteran Sylvain Gaudreault will not be on the starting line in the next election, a decision he admits having taken after a reflection started after his defeat in the party’s last leadership race .
Elected without interruption since 2007 in the riding of Jonquière, in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, Sylvain Gaudreault admits having hit his Waterloo then.
“For me it was a big disappointment. So, there, I started a deeper reflection, he confided in an interview with the QMI Agency. That being said, it’s not against Paul St-Pierre-Plamondon (the current PQ leader), we have good mutual trust.
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After having occupied almost all the possible functions for a deputy, with the notable exception of those of Prime Minister and President of the National Assembly, he also considers “to have done the trick”.
“At some point, I say to myself ‘what do I have left, how can I still be effective?'”, he wonders today.
Involved in politics since the age of 17, Sylvain Gaudreault was notably Minister of Transport and Municipal Affairs under the leadership of Pauline Marois, from September 2012 to April 2014, and interim leader of the PQ from May to October 2016 following the surprise resignation of businessman Pierre-Karl Péladeau.
If today he represents the only riding still held by the PQ in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, a region once considered a bastion of the party, but which has since become the terrain of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), he is confident that Jonquière will remain under PQ control.
Position paper
His positions, sometimes deemed unpopular with the local population, such as his early opposition to the LNG-Quebec gas liquefaction plant project, will not be obstacles for his successor, he said.
“All the parties ended up rejecting the project, with the exception of Éric Duhaime’s Conservative Party, but that’s something else. So, it’s as if the future had proven me right. [Et] every day, I received signs of support, it’s more shared than you think, ”assured the deputy.
The native of Chicoutimi intends to continue to play his role as deputy “until midnight on October 2”. After which, he considers returning to teaching, at the Cégep de Jonquière, where he still has his tenure.
Until then, he intends to participate in the drafting of the party’s next electoral platform, in particular to give it an environmental flavor, an issue that he has raised among his priorities in recent years, with social justice and sovereignty. of Quebec.
“Tectonic plates”
If he does not manage to explain the difficulties of the PQ to climb in the polls (the last Léger sounding gave 11% to his political formation), Sylvain Gaudreault remarks that the “tectonic plates” of Quebec politics have moved since his arrival.
“We are more in the bipartisanship, there are four, even five parties, there is the pandemic, it is a completely different dynamic. We can both do a political analysis, on the fragmentation of the Parti Québécois into several camps, but there will be a sociological analysis on the relationship to politics in general, ”he said.
The announcement of his departure was underlined from all sides on Tuesday, in particular by several of his colleagues and former collaborators.
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Reference-www.journaldequebec.com