Too much is just as bad as not enough, a French expression goes.
So when Pauline Marois surrounds herself with several Parti Québécois members of the National Assembly at her news conferences these days, the effect is not to make her leadership look secure, but rather threatened.
Her republican guard was there again on Wednesday as the PQ leader released the new party program compiled from the resolutions adopted at the PQ convention two months ago.
Several of her political bodyguards had signed last week's provocative "shut up" letter to former leader Jacques Parizeau, which Marois had approved. And in the prepared remarks she delivered, Marois sounded glad to have severed ties with Parizeau and the four MNAs whose resignations last week touched off the PQ's latest internal crisis.
She pointedly announced "a new Parti Québécois, with new ideas, a new approach, a new team, a new program, inspired by a new generation that has joined us."
And she claimed to have a mandate from the convention for both her leadership and her positions, including the controversial Quebec City arena bill.
But the crisis continues, and questions about Marois remain. And one of those questions, for Quebec voters as well as PQ members, is whether she is any more trustworthy than the premier she aspires to replace.
It's not a new question. In her more than 30 years in the PQ, Marois has shown a remarkable ability to adapt her principles to its changes in leadership and policy.
Some sovereignists have long suspected that her real ambition is not to make Quebec a country, but simply to make herself the first female premier of the province.
More recently, she assured PQ members two months before the convention that her proposal for the new party program to demand more power for Quebec within the federal system was made in bad faith. She confirmed that her real intention was to provoke crises in Ottawa-Quebec relations and boost support for secession.
And, in her relations with her party, it has turned out that there are two Marois: one before the leadership review at the April convention, and a different one after she received her 93-per-cent confidence vote.
Before the vote, Marois was willing to consult on policy and make whatever concessions she thought necessary. After the vote, she had the arena bill introduced in the Assembly without consulting her caucus and ordered her MNAs to vote for it, leading to last week's resignations. The resigning MNAs complained that since the convention, her leadership had become authoritarian.
Before the vote, Marois dropped her resistance to MNA Pierre Curzi's proposal to restrict admission to English-language CEGEPs.
And after the vote? La Presse reported last week that Marois planned to drop the "CEGEPs 101" proposal from the PQ platform in the next election.
Marois denied the report. But the platform won't be adopted until the election is called, which could be more than two years from now. The proposal's sponsor, Curzi, will have to defend it from outside the party, since he's among the MNAs who resigned last week.
And Marois appears to be backing away slowly from the proposal. In her prepared remarks at the news conference Wednesday, in a PQ press release and in an article in Le Devoir on Thursday, she listed several of the proposals in the new program. But in none of these three statements did Marois mention CEGEPs 101, even though it was among the proposals that received the most attention before and during the convention.
Marois has shown a willingness to act in bad faith, and to say one thing before a vote and do another afterward. So how can she be trusted?
dmapherson@montrealgazette.com
Twitter:@MacphersonGaz