A convenient fable is taking hold of Hydro-Quebec’s challenges.
Sophie Brochu, who will leave her position as CEO in April, would be a Holy Lady of the Environment who prematurely left the Hydro liner because of the ambitions of CAQ mononcles, primarily Gargamel-Fitzgibbon.
The co-spokesperson for QS, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, saw fit yesterday to relay the fable in the chamber, with forceful eloquence, it should be noted.
Barrages
“I’ll tell you what a lot of Quebecers are saying,” he said. In this “story”, the government has put “the dams before the oxen”.
Once upon a time, therefore, “a competent leader who was told in the middle of the electoral campaign that her boss wanted to build a full […] big roadblocks, but which, internally, receives a lot of documents and serious analyzes produced by people who know [de quoi] they speak […] His new boss’s plan, well, it’s improvised, then it’s unworkable. »
The result, at the Hydro, would be: save who can! Brochu, then the President of the Council, Jacynthe Côté; and finally Éric Filion, second VP.
“Is that the story? wondered GND full of false candor, before affirming that the Prime Minister refused to allow Brochu to come to the parliamentary committee.
François Legault replied by asking if it was realistic, as QS advocates, to reduce GHGs by 55% by 2030. Do we have enough electricity?
During the parliamentary commission, the leaders of Hydro will surely answer in the negative. GND had only one authoritative argument in reply: the QS Plan was “praised by all the experts”.
(Hydro’s 2022-2026 Strategic Plan, led by Brochu, dubbed by the Legault government, already says: “More than 100 TWh of additional electricity” will be needed for carbon neutrality in 2050.)
Stung, GND then stung the PM: a commission without Brochu would be like “a CAQ meeting without McKinsey”. Legault maintained that he had never refused Brochu to appear; that the latter had no “dispute [avec lui] on directions”. Then, uppercut: the head of QS “compete with Éric Duhaime” as “champion of conspiracies in Quebec”.
Facts
The fable indeed can be likened to a conspiracy. Yes, Brochu’s outing in October against the “Electricity Dollarama”, before Fitzgibbon’s appointment as super-minister, may suggest that she carried out her threat.
However, since October, there has been the creation of a single “patent”: the “Energy Transition Committee”, where the PM and CEO of Hydro sit, among others. The first meeting in December went well, we certify on all sides. Moreover, Minister Fitzgibbon’s Bill 2 – to cap the indexation of electricity rates and regulate the obligation to distribute electricity – was demanded by Hydro.
As for Jacynthe Côté and Éric Filion: the two are not in the street. The first will chair the board of directors of the Royal Bank. And the other would return to Bombardier in a lucrative position.