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LONGUEUIL, QC — “Paul is Paul. I’ve already told him to laugh from time to time,” said one seasoned Parti Québécois veteran about leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.
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Au naturel, St-Pierre Plamondon has a resting serious face. It is reportedly a challenge for photographers, who struggle to snap a picture of him with a smile on his face when he is being questioned by reporters or when he is meeting folks in the street.
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St-Pierre Plamondon likes to repeat that he has been the PQ leader for six years now and people are starting to know his style. But even after all this time, his team has to remind him to slow down to talk to people and ask them what their names are.
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When another PQ veteran was asked whether he thinks the leader should smile more, he said: “I think you’ve got a damn good idea. You should tell him!”
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The stakes are high for the PQ as they hope to form government on Oct. 5. But with a large proportion of Quebec voters who remain undecided, many could decide on a whim to support one party or another based on their impressions of the leader.
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At the time of National Post’s visit, days before the first debates, the public itinerary of the PQ leader is sparse. His team is stationed near Montreal for several days, but lots of that time is spent preparing for debates and working on upcoming announcements.
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St-Pierre Plamondon said he is comfortable with not being everywhere at once. “I’m not pretending I’m fighting for my life. I’m pretending I’m running a good campaign,” he said when National Post asked him if the slow pace of the campaign was intentional.
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He said he is running the same style of campaign as he did in 2022, when he only managed to elect three members at the National Assembly including himself.
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“It’s exactly the same leader with the same approach. So, it’s consistency rather than trying to build your campaign based on what the other campaigns are doing,” he said.
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On Friday morning, St-Pierre Plamondon was in Longueuil, on Montreal’s south shore, to present his plan to cut in half provincial taxes on gas for one year.
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Once he was done, Josée Duchesne, a local resident passing nearby, stopped him to say she identifies as a sovereigntist and congratulated him on the PQ’s “blue book” which fleshes out their vision of what an independent Quebec would look like.
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“Unfortunately, I won’t be voting for you,” she said.
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Duchesne said she cannot support the PQ this time around because of St-Pierre Plamondon’s promise to abolish Santé Québec, the government corporation responsible for health and social services across the province, where she works.
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Its abolition is estimated to save the province $40 to $100 million each year, a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $70 billion spent on health care this year.