‘The most popular politician in Quebec is Mark Carney’ | The Corner Booth

The Montreal area is the epicentre of the Canadian political landscape this week.

The federal Liberals, including Prime Minister Mark Carney, are in town for their policy convention. Tomorrow, the next CAQ leader will be announced a hop, skip and a jump away in Drummondville. Then on Monday, the riding of Terrebonne will decide their next member of Parliament in a byelection that will reverberate across the country.

Former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister David Heurtel returned to The Corner Booth podcast this week with hosts Bill Brownstein and Aaron Rand at Snowdon Deli to unpack it all.

At the top is Carney, who can seemingly do no wrong in the province these days. How Quebecers feel about him could dictate the results in Terrebonne, and his shadow from Ottawa looms large over this fall’s provincial election.

“The most popular politician in Quebec is Mark Carney. By far,” Heurtel said.

“ He doesn’t get into the traps of talking about the issue of separation. He doesn’t make a lot of missteps. If nobody had spoken French to the astronaut (on Artemis II), it would’ve been front page news.

But he did. He was smart enough. He goes to the Montreal Canadiens game,  a guy from Edmonton wearing a Montreal Canadiens cap.”

Meanwhile, Heurtel says the CAQ is imploding, and a new leader in Bernard Drainville or Christine Fréchette won’t save the party from annihilation in the next election.

“ The range of seats for the CAQ this morning is between zero and zero. I’ve never seen that before,” Heurtel said.

He also sees the party he represented in the National Assembly, the Quebec Liberals, with a steep mountain to climb in the regions, where there’s very little infrastructure at the moment. But he did praise the party’s new leader for not wading into treacherous waters in the early going.

“ Charles Milliard’s strategy of saying nothing about nothing is working very well. You gotta give him that, it’s a strategy in itself. Why get on the field when you have (Parti Québécois Leader) Paul St-Pierre Plamondon making statement after statement showing arrogance and disconnect?”

The Corner Booth is also available on The Gazette’s YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts and on Spotify.

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