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Magical
>> A half-day on the campaign trail with ADQ by PHILIP PREVILLE There's an oft-heard and much-loathed car commercial that begins like this: "Mini mini mini..."
The contrast is stark compared to the opulence enjoyed by the two major parties, both of which will spend in excess of $3 million in this campaign. Both the Liberals and the Parti Québécois have two buses: one for the party's leader and their full complement of staff (spin doctors, advisors, economists, brief-writers and speechwriters), and a second one filled with journalists. All the buses are complete with toilets, cell phones, fax machines, laptop computers and refrigerators filled with food, beer and wine. Dumont, meanwhile, travels with press attaché Marc Snyder, minivan driver Stéphane Jasmin, one computer and some snacks for the road. "I'm sorry, but there's simply no room left in the minivan," Snyder said in response to the Mirror's request to tag along for one day. Technically, of course, Snyder is telling a mini fib. There is still one seat left in the minivan, but it's being taken up by about eight suit bags. While leader Dumont can do without all the staffers and knickknacks the other leaders drag along with them, he still needs a full wardrobe so he can refresh his look between media appearances. "The people at La fin du monde est à 7 heures [the Quebec equivalent of This Hour Has 22 Minutes] felt sorry for us, so they rented a school bus, got some schoolkids to paint 'ADQ' on it in big blue letters and trailed us around Chicoutimi," Snyder explains. Message received: if media want to tag along, they'll have to do it in their own car. The Mirror and its French-language sister publication, Ici, obliged. Free food, no takers
The day begins at ADQ headquarters, where Dumont holds a 10 a.m. press conference to talk about--oh hurray--the constitution. Sober questions get sober answers. From 11 to 11:45 he conducts a number of phone interviews before heading off for a live 45-minute segment on TVA, Quebec's leading French-language network. TVA takes pride in its noon-hour interviews with key personalities: they have a press room, complete with free lunch, where other journalists can come and watch the interview on a half-dozen large wall-mounted colour TV sets. When the interview is over, the interviewee normally comes down and takes questions from all the journalists who showed up for the free food. Unfortunately, Dumont's day is starting to look like a write-off. In his television interview, he finds himself answering the same questions he's been asked all morning. Meanwhile, down in the press room, the three-person Mirror/Ici team have a free lunch all to themselves because they're the only ones who showed up. All the egg-salad sandwiches and crudités you can eat. The scene is embarrassing for everyone present. Our photographer is licking his chops looking at the chocolate cake, but he doesn't want to be the only one to cut a slice out of that perfect, pristine, ornately iced brown disk. The nice lady acting as TVA's social convener encourages him to dig in; the two reporters dare him to go for it. He declines. Make a run for it Dumont, however, is the most embarrassed of all. On television, he's challenged over the fact that he has candidates in all 125 ridings, but none of them are "star candidates." It's a bogus line of questioning--the ADQ has 125 Quebecers who have chosen to put their names and their beliefs on the line, so who cares if they're stars or not--but Dumont doesn't have his wits about him to strike back. At this point, minivan driver Jasmin comes in very, very handy as an advance spy for the campaign. He comes around to the press room, sees that only three journalists are present, and sends word up to the studio, where Dumont is wrapping up the interview. Rather than conduct a press conference with the only journalists waiting to speak to him, Dumont makes a run for his minivan. As we wonder where he is, we look out the window and watch the Dumont Express flash across our field of vision, speeding him away to his next meeting. Ironically, he'll be once again meeting with journalists--this time the Quebec Association of Community Media. Not wishing to embarrass him further or to appear as shameless freeloaders, the Mirror/Ici team bring their one-day shadowing mission to an end. An electronic mailbox in every home Interestingly, Dumont went through the nine-to-five part of his day without meeting a single voter. But that jives perfectly with his party's election platform: if the ADQ formed a government, Quebec would become Cyberspace Nation, eliminating the need for people to ever meet face-to-face. "Our policy is to make Quebec 100-per-cent wired," Dumont said in his interview earlier in the day. "Everyone in Quebec would have an e-mail address. If you didn't have a computer, you'd be able to log on through your TV. And every government department, all public documents, all programs and forms would be available online." The ADQ's techno-savvy, government-by-machine platform is part of Dumont's attempt to characterize himself as the candidate for youth. The ADQ has 56 candidates under the age of 35, compared with seven for the PQ and and nine for the Liberals. He has also carried the opposition torch against so-called "orphan clauses," the clauses in the collective agreements between unions and the government that allow younger employees to be paid lower wages. And he gets visibly angry when he talks about young people doing contract work for the government while all the cottonheads enjoy lifetime job security. "Young people don't have a lot of hope," says Dumont. Careful not to sound ageist, he adds that "we need to have a better balance between generations." As for the ADQ's other policies: they don't want Quebec to separate, but they have a wish list as long as your arm of powers they want to take from the federal government. They're in favour of smaller government. They want to cut taxes. They'd overhaul the welfare system, which they call a "failure," to encourage people to get back into the workforce. Rather conservative for the party of youth, don't you think? Dumont says stereotypes of left-wing youth don't apply anymore: "Young people want a job market that gives them opportunities. They may be open to state intervention, but not the kind of state intervention we had in the 1970s--that doesn't represent what young people think at all." :
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Mario Dumont could easily adopt that well-known jingle as his campaign theme song. As leader of the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ), Dumont heads up Québec's third-most-popular party: the latest polls give the ADQ a respectably minuscule 7.3 per cent. At age 28, he's something of a mini-leader. He's in charge of his own mini-caucus in the National Assembly, being the ADQ's only sitting member. And he's running a campaign in miniature: with a budget of about half a million bucks, he's criss-crossing the entire province in a minivan.
A typical day on Mario Dumont's campaign trail looks something like this: microphone, minivan, microphone, minivan, microphone, minivan.