Philippe Couillard Needs to Clean House...

There's an old saying that reminds us that a 'new broom sweeps clean, in other words new management starts by making radical changes.

There's a tradition in Quebec, that when the premiership changes, certain very senior civil servants, deputy ministers in particular, are shuffled about in order to place those more loyal to the incoming government in positions of power, while shuffling off those loyal to the previous government, to less  sensitive areas of responsibility.
It isn't cruel or disrespectful and makes infinite good sense. Nobody is humiliated, those who are shuffled off are treated well and given positions  which are respectful to their previous positions.

But it certainly doesn't go far enough, especially in light of the PQ's avalanche of patronage appointments, which has over the last eighteen months seen an obscene amount of PQ loyalists, party hacks and failed candidates placed in too many positions of power.

And so for Philippe Couillard there lies an interesting political opportunity, one where he very well may kill two birds with one stone.

For Couillard and the Liberals, the only dark cloud on the horizon is the ominous threat of damaging revelations in relation to alleged corruption in the Liberal party.
Those revelations, if materialized would certainly sap the energy of the government, as opposition parties whoop it up in mock indignation, aided and abetted by a voracious press eager to trumpet scandal.

And so it would be perspicacious of Couillard to get in front of this possible bad news by becoming the champion of some honest reform, an effort to clean up government in some discernible and meaningful way that the public could appreciate, a definitive sign that Couillard is not Charest and is in fact the leader of a reborn and re-branded Liberal party.

To this end Couillard can demonstrate his resolve by sucking it up, and publicly ending the awarding of partisan patronage jobs, a practice which I have referred to in the past by its British slang...."Jobs for the Boys"

Despite Pauline's noisy claim during the 2012 election campaign that a potential PQ government would be somehow cleaner and more honest than the Liberal predecessor, it was but an empty slogan, a campaign promise like any other, meant to be broken, a Quebec tradition.
Upon her election, Pauline Marois embarked on an obscene orgy of partisan patronage appointments, with the early appointment of ex-PQ leader André Boisclair  to the position of Quebec Delegate-General in New York, most notable.
What got the ire of the then opposition Liberals and the CAQ was that this political 'at will' position was coupled with a job in the civil service at the level comparable to a deputy-minister, complete with job security for life.
When the opposition raised a ruckus, this 'permanence' was withdrawn and Pauline, in an effort to take the heat off, set up a committee to study and recommend the conditions under which these patronage positions should be made.
That report, prepared by a committee lead by André Perrault submitted its recommendations a year later, in December 2013, a report which recommended that these appointments be  made transparently, with greater emphasis placed on competence. Read the report{fr}

But Marois brushed off the report, first saying that she was too busy to read it and then saying that its recommendations were non-binding and simply food for thought and nothing more.
She told reporters that she would probably not implement its findings.
The report noted that about half of the 600 most senior positions in government are the issue of patronage appointments.

And so Philippe Couillard can truly distinguish himself by implementing the report's recommendations, that is to seriously curb political influence in the nomination of senior government employees.

That being said, this new campaign should be accompanied by a serious purge of the most outrageous appointments made by the Marois government over the last eighteen months.
I think a very public humiliation of all those appointees would set the tone of the Couillard government and would have the PQ backed up on their heels immediately, forced to defend the indefensible.

Now those appointed to the civil service cannot be fired, such is job security in Quebec. They've got a job for life, like it or leave it.
But those political hacks appointed to senior deputy minister positions should be sent to a desk to twiddle their thumbs for the rest of their days, à la Louise Marchand the disgraced ex-boss of the OQLF, who was sent packing to a do-nothing job at the SAQ, the liquor monopoly.

All these newly-appointed civil-servants, political hacks and PQ cronies should be demoted moved into dead-end less sensitive positions.

Here is a list of some of the PQ appointment made in the first few months of the Marois government.

Click on the image to enlarge

If you  are adventuresome, you can go through all the patronage appointments made by the government HERE selected by month and year.

At any rate some of these political appointments are not 'for life' as in the Quebec civil service, some for a fixed term, some actually 'at will'

The following is a list of PQ proxies that should be fired immediately by Couillard, paid off whatever is owing and publicly denounced as partisan political hacks installed in their various positions to do the PQs bidding.
Good riddance..

Andre Boisclair

The poster boy of political entitlement.
Boisclair was named Delegate-General to New York, a political position that paid $172k a year, but a job whereby the holder keeps the job at the pleasure of the government (at will.)  In other words, he can be fired anytime.
That didn't suit Boisclair at all, just in case the PQ minority government was tossed from office and the new Premier, not a particular fan. How prescient was that?

And so he negotiated himself a lifetime position in the civil-service, an insurance policy in the event of a PQ defeat at the polls.
It's something that the opposition went ballistic over and when the devious plot to give Boisclair a job for life went viral, Pauline backed down and the PQ withdrew the offer of permanency.
But soon after Boisclair took the job in New York, he came under fire over some scurrilous allegations made by Jacques Duchesneau over Boisclair's cocaine use of the past, With the pressure mounting, he was forced to resign by Marois who promised him a compensatory position.
That job materialized in the form of the head of COMEX, an obscure agency that deals with native issues up north. Even after visiting the website, I cannot say for sure what the organization does, reminding me perhaps of the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs of the British political satire Yes! Minister.


The problem was that the previous president was paid a measly $82K, so the PQ topped up the position's salary by about $100,00...Yup. $100K
To put put the cherry on top, the agency is based in Quebec city but Boisclair was told he could work from his home in Montreal.
Tony Soprano himself would be proud of the epic no-show job!

Nobody deserves to get the chop as badly as Boisclair, no matter what the cost, he is an utter disgrace and insult to taxpayers.
At least if he's fired and collects his salary there will be no pretense that he's contributing to society.
OUT DAMN SPOT!


Sylvain Simard

The defeated PQ candidate was handed the presidency of the board of directors of the SAQ, Quebec's liquor monopoly, even though the current president had a year left on his mandate.
The job is mostly honorific, and doesn't pay six figures but the naked partisanship is galling.
The then Minister of Finance Nicolas Marceau,  brazened it out, telling journalists that he was the perfect candidate for the job.

Really?
Simard doesn't bring any business experience to the job, before politics he was a 'distinguished' Quebec nationalist writer and literature professor. He has been a PQ politician most of life until his retirement before the 2012 election.
In 1991, he argued that a sovereign Quebec would try to reduce the concentration of immigrant communities in Montreal neighbourhoods.

At any rate, the job calls for Simard to show up to just a handful of board meetings a years, where he can sleep through the proceedings to collect his $30K.
Truth be told, attendance is not even mandatory....
Appointing the 70 year old Simard to the SAQ job is as pure a patronage appointment as they come.

Nicolas Girard

From the CBC;
"Defeated in the recent provincial election, former Parti Québécois MNA Nicolas Girard has landed a plum post at the Agence Métropolitaine de Transport, the agency in charge of transit planning for the Montreal area.
The appointment was confirmed Wednesday at the PQ government's cabinet meeting in Quebec City.

"I have a lot of confidence in Nicolas Girard's abilities," Transport Minister Sylvain Gaudreault said....

...Girard lost his seat in the Montreal riding of Gouin to Québec Solidaire co-spokesperson Françoise David. She defeated him by 4,564 votes in the Sept. 4 election.

Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault denounced the appointment as cronyism.

"Mr. Girard, with all his skills, doesn't have any experience in management. So this is exactly what the Parti Québécois had been denouncing: partisanship over ability," Legault said.

The presidency of the AMT carries a salary of about $170,000 a year, well more than the basic MNA salary of $86,242 plus certain expenses.   Link

Nicolas Girard, a political science graduate, is a PQ lifer, hired right out of university. During his time at the Université de Montréal he was a tireless PQ organizer as well as, what else... a student union leader.

But criticism of Girard over his absence of business experience or knowledge of the train industry is perhaps unfair.
Mr. Girard was an avid train enthusiast as a child, and was even a conductor of his very own H/O train set, immersing himself in all aspects of building and running trains.
He was also an experienced real estate mogul having played countless hours on Monopoly Monopolie, buying and selling hotels and houses successfully!


Conseil du statut de la femme
When the president of Quebec's Conseil du statut de la femme (Council of Status of Women) Julie Miville-Dechêne came out somewhat against the Charter of Values, saying it needed further study before a firm position be adopted by the semi-autonomous agency, Pauline moved quickly to neutralize any potential political damage  that might ensue.
She stacked the odds by naming four new members to the body, all pro-charter.

"The head of the Quebec status-of-women organization accused the government of political interference after it appointed four pro-charter members to the body, the Conseil du statut de la femme.
Julie Miville-Dechene said the nominations came just one week before the organization was to meet to discuss the PQ's plan to forbid the wearing of religious symbols in the public service.
In a statement issued Thursday on government letterhead, Miville-Dechene called it her job to defend the group, which is supposed to be non-partisan and which "has, at its heart, the interests of all Quebecers, regardless of their origin."
She said that, until the latest nominations, half the council's members preferred the idea of conducting some research to evaluate the impact of the charter on women. She all but accused the government of implementing policy on the fly.  Link

The four nominations;
Lucie Martineau is president of the Syndicat de la fonction publique et parapublique du Québec. The day after the Charter was announced, she publicly came out in favour of the law, saying that government employees shouldn't be allowed to wear religious symbols. 

Julie Latour is a lawyer and ex-chairman of the Montreal bar association. In an interview back in 2011 she explained that she flatly rejects the concept of 'open secularism.

Leila Lesbet, is an ardent Muslim Arab feminist, originally from Algeria. She has been a staunch defender of the Charter, making the rounds of the various TV news talk shows, to offer her point of view.

Ann Longchamps is deeply involved with the Association féminine d’éducation et d’action sociale, who publicly took a position in favour of the Charter on behalf of the organization.

The four women changed the balance of power on the ten-women board that runs the CSP. Two positions were vacant and two other women did not have their mandates renewed. Wonder why?

All these women need to be fired, not because they are against the Charter, but rather because they tacitly agreed to be political whores on behalf of the PQ.

BAPE
It took less than two months for the PQ to install two radical environmentalists to run  the BAPE (Bureau d'audiences publiques sur l'environnement,) the agency that holds public inquiries looking into the environmental impact of various energy projects in Quebec.

The PQ fired the president of the agency, deemed too 'Liberal' for the taste of the anti-exploration PQ, even though he had just had his mandate renewed. That firing will cost four and a half years of taxpayer-paid salary.

The PQ then named Pierre Baril as president and as if we hadn't spent enough money, added a new vice-president Louis-Gilles Francoeur.
Both nominations were made by the then PQ environment minister, the very radical Daniel Breton.
The two nominations of liked-minded environmentalists to the agency insures that no new project of impact could ever be judged on the merits.

Both gentlemen need to be shown the door.


As for patronage appointments, it seems that it's all a question of perspective, when in government, the appointments seem fair, while in opposition they are portrayed for what they really are.
In this regard I want to draw attention to the insufferably partisan Bernard Drainville of the PQ;

"Yesterday, the PQ Premier Pauline Marois announced the appointment of erstwhile Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau as chairman of the board of Hydro-Québec. Nothing wrong here, of course. Nakedly political and partisan appointments to Crown corporations are as much a staple in Quebec as anywhere else. It’s a way of thanking well-connected party supporters, currying favour with the powerful, and/or stealthily (or not so stealthily) advancing one’s own political agenda. Call it a winner’s perk, for both the political party and the individual involved. Drainville must approve; he hasn’t uttered a peep about Péladeau’s appointment.
This certainly wasn’t the case two years ago, when Drainville was righteously (and rightly) outraged at the patronage appointment of former Bell Canada CEO Michael Sabia, that other wealthy, well-connected businessman with known ties to the government in power. Here’s the transcript of a video snippet of Drainville’s reaction when Charest appointed Sabia as CEO of the Caisse de dépôt et placement, the provincially controlled public pension plan manager, in March 2009.

The reason we think [Sabia] is disqualified for the job of CEO [of La Caisse], is because of the process by which he was appointed. Michael Sabia was chosen by Jean Charest. There should have been a much more open process where other candidates were examined. In fact, the Caisse de dépot only considered one candidate, and it was Michael Sabia. [...] It was obviously a political decision. The Caisse shouldn’t be politicized, to become an instrument of the Premier of Quebec. It makes no sense.

Drainville’s 2009 musings about Sabia are even more fragrant in retrospect for a couple of other reasons. He scolded Charest for having appointed Sabia in part because Sabia still had business interests in Bell Canada. Drainville went so far as to say Sabia was in “conflict of interest” because Sabia could potentially benefit financially from Caisse decisions. Read the rest of the Story.

Couillard needs to implant a new system for public appointments and that goes all the way to include the 600 or so public tribunal administrators, who today are mostly appointed, not on competence, but connections.
 If you read French, here's an interesting article on the subject Link{fr}

Taking partisanship out of public nominations would be a big step in re-establishing credibility and Lord knows, the Liberals are going to have to work hard in that respect, especially in the face of the ongoing revelations coming out of the Charbonneau Commission and by the actions by UPAC.