Get ready to vote again

BY MARC LALONDE

marc.lalonde@transcontinental.ca

Quebec Premier Jean Charest is expected to call a provincial election today for March 26 after laying out a new provincial budget yesterday afternoon.

Charest’s local contact and his parliamentary assistant, Robert Baldwin MNA Pierre Marsan basically said as much in a phone interview conducted while he was en route to Quebec City yesterday afternoon.

“The table will be set for an announcement. All the pieces are in place,” he said, while declining to comment further. “Mr. Charest has told me there will be an election soon.”

Marsan also took a few minutes to discuss the lifting of a tuition freeze for Quebec universities, saying the new tuition rate will increase by $100 for the next half-decade before the new maximum settles at $2,168 per semester.

“It compares with an increase of $2 per week,” Marsan said. “The students will not have to pay much more and the government will inject $1 billion into the education system. We understand that students have costs; they’re either not working at all or they have part-time jobs and they’ll have to cope with the increase in costs,” he said.

What doesn’t get mentioned very often in the tuition-freeze debate is the extra ancillary, laboratory and administration fees that students have been paying for years in lieu of higher tuition, which can increase a semester’s cost by up to $1,000, Marsan added.

“We’re going to improve things for students this way,” he said.

Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ) candidate Walter Rulli, who will take on Liberal incumbent Geoff Kelley in Jacques Cartier, said he is rubbing his hands together in anticipation of an election.

“That’s what we’re preparing for. My information’s as good as anyone else’s is,” he said, adding he looks forward to taking Kelley and the Liberals to task for the botched de-merger promises of 2003.

“I think the Liberals blew it. Back when they decided to make the rule that 35 per cent of voters must vote in the referendum to be binding. People in Pierrefonds, Ile Bizard and Roxboro, they got screwed on it, because never before in Quebec did there have to be a rule about minimum participation. It was always 50 per cent plus one is a majority. I think that was patently unfair. Now, the de-merged towns are being taken for granted, and the fact that these ridings vote for the Liberals in such huge numbers indicates the government thinks they can do whatever they want with those ridings and those voters,” Rulli said.

Rulli doesn’t believe Charest’s proposal to cut $250 million in personal taxes in the government’s next mandate, saying it was too reminiscent of the last time they promised a tax cut.

“(Quebec is) the highest-taxed jurisdiction not only in North America, but in the G7,” Rulli said. “Seeing as (Charest) didn’t come clean last time (with a five-year, $5 billion tax cut), it’s hard to believe him this time around.”

One matter of some local speculation has now been settled, though. Kirkland city councillor Michel Gibson, who unsuccessfully sought the Liberal nomination in Nelligan in 2004 and ran against Liberal Yolande James as an independent in a 2004 byelection, has long been rumoured to be taking her on under the ADQ banner. Monday, he put those rumours to rest — for now, at least.

“It will definitely be a no. Unless I get public support from one (particular) mayor, I’m not going to run. We could definitely have a change, but for now, it’s no,” he said.