If you believe François Legault when he says he's leaving politics with "no plan to return," I have two words for you: John Turner.
He is the Liberal finance minister who quit politics in 1975, went back to the private sector, saying he wasn't "en réserve de la république," sat out the rest of the Trudeau era, then returned in 1984 to succeed the same Pierre Trudeau.
Pauline Marois did the same in 2006. After André Boisclair became leader, she left, saying she wanted to "tend her garden." But she came back to succeed Boisclair when he quit in 2007. So did Boisclair, who left for Harvard in 2004 when Bernard Landry launched his "season of ideas," but returned in 2006 after Landry left. You get the pattern.
So, considering that Legault had leadership ambitions from the moment Lucien Bouchard recruited him in 1998 and that he leaves as the Parti Québécois star on economic issues, chances are that he wants to wait outside the PQ while the jury is still out on Marois's leadership qualities, and see what happens in the next election.
Like other politicians who followed this pattern, it's clear that Legault, although he called Marois "generous" and a "team player," was moving further away from his leader's vision, especially on the national question.
Yesterday, Legault said that while he still sees sovereignty as a "relevant project," he called it a "challenge among others." Raising Quebec's overall "quiet decline," both demographic and economic, he didn't list sovereignty in his three main worries: the wealth gap between Quebec and other states on this continent, serious inefficiencies in our health and education system, and weakened public finances.
On Marois's plan for the patriation of powers while remaining in Canada, he said it would "advance" Quebec. But on sovereignty itself, Legault repeated almost word for word what he said last year when he made a splash stating that the PQ should shelve its option, tend to the economy and wait for confidence to return within the population. "The cynicism and loss of confidence of the people in the entire political class," he said, "makes it difficult to achieve sovereignty."
Interestingly, Legault raised the spectre of this "democratic malaise" as early as October 2004, in a 28-page manifesto he titled The Courage to Change - seen at the time as a direct challenge to Landry's leadership.
But the huge difference was that in 2004, instead of concluding that this should put sovereignty on the back burner, Legault called for the PQ to lead on that issue. To rebuild this confidence, he wrote, the PQ must "prove that it can govern better, open itself more to Quebec's diversity, promote sovereignty in a more concrete and convincing way," make education the basis for this project, consult citizens and party members, not just its insiders lost in "esoteric debates," produce new studies on what sovereignty would bring to the people, and commit to hold a referendum "at the start of a new mandate" without attaching any "specific conditions."
This was urgent, he thought in 2004, because if it loses its raison d'être, the PQ risks disappearing. Except for a few details, ironically, this is pretty much what Jacques Parizeau has been saying for years and what he repeated on June 6 when he spoke in front of the Intellectuels pour la souveraineté.
But in 2009, Legault reverses this proposition, now saying "major collective projects" such as sovereignty will come back only when the people believe in politics again, instead of politicians bringing back this confidence by fostering such projects. In the meantime, he now says, other challenges must be tended to.
It used to be that the PQ could walk and chew gum at the same time by hitching a socio-economic vision to its sovereignty project. But that ceased to be the case after the last referendum. Even Marois has chosen an autonomist, step-by-step plan.
In 2004, an ambitious Legault thought that it took a renewed and audacious promotion of sovereignty to address what he calls, with reason, Quebec's "quiet decline." But it sounds like he's leaving, for now, with a very different conclusion.