Log Cabin Chronicles

Old Quebec City

Photograph/John Mahoney

INSIDE QUEBEC

With PETER BLACK

Oh, Those Perplexing Polls

If Jean Charest seems a little less curly these days it's probably because he's been pulling his hair out trying to make sense of some perplexing polling numbers. The numbers reflect a contradiction in Quebec voting patterns that may send him and the Liberals to the morgue Nov. 30.

In the epic CROP poll published in La Presse this week, the poll that shows the Liberals with a thin, but electorally losing lead, there are several sub-surveys on questions intended to reveal what's ticking in the noodle of average Quebec voters. It's the survey on satisfaction with the government's handling of six key issues that is particularly telling. Overall, the Bouchard government has a moderately low rating of 37 percent satisfied, 51 dissatisfied and 13 percent indifferent.

The figure that leaps out from the pack, though, is the PQ administration's score for handling of health care reforms. Here, only seven percent are undecided, 23 percent satisfied and 70 percent dissatisfied. The only rating that approaches health for generating public grumbling is unemployment where a solid 58 percent gives thumbs down to Bouchard. Health care reform then would seem to be far and away the most inviting chink in Bouchard's armor.

In Quebec, as is the case elsewhere in Canada, the health care system has been targeted by government as a prime candidate for the reduction of wasteful spending and duplication of services. The minister who took on the task for the Parizeau-Bouchard government was Jean Rochon, a doctor-bureaucrat who in a previous incarnation chaired a public commission on health care reforms.

Rochon set about streamlining the delivery of medical services at the same time as the post-referendum PQ government began hacking in earnest at the deficit. As Rochon himself admitted in a controversial interview, he was a trifled steamed to find his tidy effort to bring efficiency to health services tangled up in the butchery of the deficit battle.

Customers of the health care system consequently were treated to abrupt and badly explained hospital closings, a mass exodus of nurses, Calcutta-like conditions in some emergency wards while others are empty, doctors threatening strikes for better pay, and on and on. There was little question based on the past two years of public anger and confusion that health care would be a nice tail with which the Liberals would swing the PQ cat come the election.

So figure this one out. Despite that towering 70 percent disapproval rate - "furious," says the La Presse headline - Quebecers still think Premier Bouchard is the better man than Jean Charest to handle the health care file, despite the fact the Liberal leader has made health his number one plank and indeed has promised to freeze all further cuts as his first act as newly elected premier.

As Claude Gauthier of CROP explains, the Liberals have not been able, so far, to cash in on this huge gift of an issue. It's quite possible that Quebec voters are angry, but forgiving of the PQ for their handling of health care reform. Indeed, another finding from the CROP survey may explain the apparent contradiction.

On the question of the clean-up of public finances and the deficit, the Bouchard government scores it highest mark at 51 percent. Voters seem to say, it had to be done, we're not happy about how you did it, but we're not ready to toss you out of office for having done it.

If health care doesn't light a fire for the Liberal campaign, Charest and company could be toast.

CBC logo Peter Black is a writer living in Quebec City, where he is the producer of Quebec A.M. -- CBC Radio's popular English-language morning show (91.7 FM, 6-9, Mon.-Fri).


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