Quebec premier Pauline Marois has announced that the youngest member of the Quebec legislature, Léo Bureau-Blouin, who will turn 22-years-old, Sept. 17, will crisscross Quebec, in order to find out what the province’s youth wants.
Bureau-Blouin’s media spokesman Mathieu Morin confirmed the plan in a telephone interview, but declined to provide details of when and where the confabs will be held, saying that “the itinerary for the consultations will be announced during the coming few weeks.”
The tour is part of the Parti Québécois government’s recent attempts to renew the Quebec government’s “action plan” for youth. Marois tapped Bureau-Blouin to lead the consultations. She has also assigned Terrebonne’s representative in Quebec City, Mathieu Traversy, 28, as well as the elected representative for St. Jean riding, Dave Turcotte, 29, to accompany him.
The discourse is expected to be highly partisan, since all three elected members of the provincial parliamentary panel who will guide the discourse belong to the Parti Québécois.
“This will be an opportunity to invite youth to get involved in the future and to contemplate the Quebec of 2030,” Turcotte said in a statement. “It will simultaneously, grapple with the demographic stakes central to the challenges that Quebec society will face in coming years.” There has been no indication to what extent—if at all—the trio of fledgling politicians will at any point sound out the aspirations of young people who belong to Quebec’s English or cultural communities.
Likewise yet to be determined is how much it will cost Quebec taxpayers for the Péquiste government’s youth secretariat to conduct the province-wide series of hearings.
Marois, who co-opted student activist Bureau-Blouin to the Péquiste cause, last week took flak from other student activists whom she and Quebec labour unions openly supported prior to last year’s provincial election. Marois has, since taking office, carefully stage-managed her young legislators to avoid gaffes. When she announced the tour in St. Jean sur Richelieu, Feb. 25, she used the occasion to declare that the Quebec government will extend its “youth action strategy” for another year, until 2014.
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