Équipe Christine Fréchette is the CAQ. Same machine. New wrapping

The name on the sign is not a new party

Équipe Christine Fréchette is not a citizens’ movement that fell from the sky. It is the Coalition Avenir Québec under another label. Same caucus. Same apparatus. Same record. François Legault’s party did not dissolve. It changed clothes.

On the posters, the three letters disappear. In the ridings, militants have had to peel the truth back onto the cardboard themselves. A young man going around with CAQ stickers did more civic pedagogy in one evening than the party’s whole communications shop.

If a formation is proud of its work, it prints its name. If it hides it, it has a reason.

Fréchette did not arrive from elsewhere

Christine Fréchette is not an outsider. She sat at the cabinet table. She held Immigration before taking the economy and then the leadership of the same formation. Judging “the team” without judging that record is a confidence trick.

As minister of immigration, she inherited and then administered the central contradiction of this government: talk of capacité d’accueil on television, keep the tap open in practice, then act surprised when housing, French, schools and hospitals crack. Family reunification backlogs, the tug-of-war over the Programme de l’expérience québécoise, thresholds announced then revised, Ottawa still deciding the bulk of the volume — the speech was “Québec decides,” the result was a province that submits and then lectures.

A nationalist government that does not control its doors is not nationalist. It is a subcontractor.

The CAQ’s worst fiascos — a reminder

The new label does not erase the file.

• The pandemic and the CHSLDs. The first wave left the most fragile Quebecers to die in understaffed long-term care. The images of 2020 are not a detail. They are the original sin of this era in power.

• SAAQclic. A digital “modernization” that became a sinkhole: delays, cost overruns, a commission, ministers passing the parcel. The citizen pays twice — in taxes and in line.

• Northvolt. The flagship, the subsidies, the speeches about the battery valley — then the retreat, the hole, the embarrassment. Industrial policy as a press conference.

• SIFA and the other white elephants. Billions promised, projects that stall, a state that confuses announcement with delivery.

• Roads and hospitals. Potholes as a landscape. Emergency rooms as a waiting room for a country that no longer treats its own. That is not Donald Trump. That is Quebec City and Ottawa.

• Ethics and the court of friends. The CAQ came to power against “the system.” It became the system: contracts, networks, a party-state tone, contempt for anyone who still says the word nation without a marketing plan.

• The identity file, emptied. A few laws for the gallery; on the ground, the demographic and linguistic shift continues. Slogan in French, reality in numbers.

Corruption, in the wide sense, is not only envelopes. It is also the corruption of language: calling continuity renewal, calling a rebrand a new team.

The tour of seniors’ homes

In recent months Fréchette has done the circuit of residences. Fine. What is not fine is the script: scare the elderly with Trump, dump inflation, gasoline, the state of the roads, the hospitals and the migratory surge on a foreign president — and never say the sentence that honesty requires.

It is not because of Trump that a litre of gas burns a paycheck in Quebec. It is not because of Trump that the pavement opens under the wheel. It is not because of Trump that the ER is a camp. It is not because of Trump that the housing stock and the French fact are under pressure.

That bill has two names: the CAQ in Quebec City and the Liberals in Ottawa. Federalism as it is practised is a machine for irresponsibility: each capital points to the other, and the nation pays.

Using the fear of American politics to avoid a provincial record is not respect for seniors. It is treating them as a captive audience.

A nation is not a marketing product

Quebec does not need a new sticker. It needs a government that says who governs, who enters, who pays, and who decides.

Canadian federalism will not save the French fact. The CAQ will not save it by erasing its own acronym. The elites who find this “clever” are the same ones who find mass immigration “enriching” and the hospital “complex.”

Équipe Christine Fréchette is the CAQ. Same party. Same eight years. Same federal reflex: look away, blame elsewhere, keep the seat.

The sign is torn. The three letters are underneath. That is the whole story. The 5th October let's get CAQ out !