Raging Duff

Three months after this spring's provincial election, pollster CROP finds Action Democratique leader Mario Dumont is still the man.
The PQ’s new leader Pauline Marois may have her party’s support, but according to an omnibus CROP poll in this morning’s La Presse, she can’t expect a honeymoon from the voting public.
According to last week's survey of 1000 households, Marois trails ADQ leader Mario Dumont in popularity, while Liberal Leader Jean Charest continues to bleed support.
But listen to this: 48 percent, or nearly half of those polled who claim to be PQ supporters want the party to abandon the sovereignty option. Instead, they want Quebec to push for more powers from Ottawa.
Continuing in the same vein as two weekend polls, 60 percent of PQ voters told the CROP pollsters it’s unlikely that Quebec will ever achieve sovereignty. That’s in line with separate polls published this past Saturday in La Presse and Le Devoir indicating that 85 percent of Quebeckers see the secession option either stagnating or dropping in popularity, while 83 percent see Quebec as a part of Canada in 10 years’ time.
The 40-percent Marois bounce CROP reported after Andre Boisclair was dumped has disappeared. If an election were to take place this week, we’d have another minority government, probably a pequiste government, with 29 percent to the ADQ’s 28 and the Liberals’ 27.
Overall, 68 percent of Quebeckers said they favoured the PQ scrapping plank #1 of their platform calling for Quebec independence. If a referendum on secession had been held this week, 32 percent of those polled said they’d vote Yes, a four-point drop over last month.
An interesting footnote: CROP has reformulated its referendum question. For the past 12 years, the question has always been based on the sovereignty-association partnership deal proposed in the 1995 referendum. Since April, CROP has split it in two. Support for sovereignty-partnership stands at 42 percent, but support for straight-up secession stands at 32 percent.
As for who’d make the best premier, Marois gets 32 percent, a point more than Mario Dumont....seems the hit he took for not taking part in budget negotiations has been forgiven.
Three quarters of those polled said gender didn’t matter in the leadership question, while 26 percent of female respondents and 22 percent of all those polled said Marois being a woman was a plus. But Marois still trails Dumont when it comes to new ideas — the ADQ chief is seen by 52 percent of the voting public as proposing the best new ideas for Quebec, versus 15 percent for Marois and 11 percent for Charest.
Who inspires the most confidence? Mario at 34 percent, 28 percent for Pauline and 21 percent for Jean. Among francophones, we see the same split: 38 percent for Dumont, 32 percent for Marois and 16 percent for Charest. 11 percent said none inspired any confidence.
If the pequistes had hoped Marois would be perceived as the champion of family values, they were mistaken. 51 percent see Dumont as the best family-values advocate, compared to Marois’ 21 percent and Charest’s 14 percent. So much for those big tax cuts.
In fact, Dumont still wins out when it came to asking who cares most about Quebec’s $125 billion fiscal burden. The ADQ leader polled 37%, Charest finished second at 26 percent and Marois, the former finance minister, was at the bottom, with 15%.
Health? Again, Mario is cited by respondents as the man to solve Quebec’s ER woes — 27%, Marois, 25%, Charest, 18 %. 30 percent had no response.
Environment: Mario’s the man for 27 percent, with Charest and Marois tied at 20 percent and a third of those polled having no opinion.

Posted by Jim Duff at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quebec is going full tilt into the production of cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel produced from forestry and farm waste and garbage. It is not designed to replace gasoline as a primary fuel, but to stretch gas by up to 85 percent. Quebec’s Green Plan sees a far more modest role for booze in your tank...Premier Jean Charest said today the plan calls for the production of 400 million litres by 2012, equal to 5% of Quebec’s total gas consumption.
There two pilot plants planned for the Townships — the Westbury plant will use landfill garbage and farm waste, while a second plant, associated with the Kruger plant in Bromptonville, will use forestry waste. Quebec currently has a single ethanol plant, in Varennes, producing 120 million litres.
The pilot projects will cost $25 million, $6 million of that from the public purse. The rest comes from the private sector and the University of Sherbrooke. Charest’s Liberals are hoping cellulosic ethanol production will give a boost to Quebec’s dying forestry industry.
Another example of a Quebec government using a crisis to try to solve another crisis.
How many times have we seen this before? Some years back, Quebec got into the sugar beet industry because sugar prices were sky-high. We paid a fortune for Quebec’s subsidized sugar and the thing went bust.
We subsidize the hamburger industry and the dairy producers, thanks to Charest. The Liberals expropriated the abattoir where the dairy farmers took their clapped-out milk cows because they weren’t getting enough money from the private owners.
The Montreal Transit Corp. launched a biodiesel pilot project based on cheap diesel fuel from a South Shore rendering plant that collects dead farm animals in those Viande Non Comestible trucks. Before mad cow, farmers sold their deadstock to these folks who transformed it into animal feed. When that was outlawed, Quebec tried to solve the problem of all those dead animals piling up by turning them into biodiesel. It was a disaster.
Same with windfarms. Charest wants to generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity with windpower — but not to increase Quebec’s electrical geration. It’s supposedly to incubate expertise in windpower for communities off the grid, but a key factor in the bidding process is job creation in economically depressed regions. Each megawatt will cost taxpayers and hydro customers 10 times as much as that same megawatt from hydro power.
Politics and economics make uneasy bedfellows in Quebec. State capitalism was supposed to end when the Liberals took power, but it’s one of those beliefs so engrained in the Quebec psyche, I suspect it will never change.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)