In another life, Bernard Landry might have been a poet because, in this one, he is quite a wordsmith. The trilingual Landry speaks spontaneously in Spanish idioms and French metaphors, and stuffs his sentences with often obscure, but always learned and evocative, references. In most of North America, a prosaic civilization if there ever was one, a politician like Landry might be considered a pretentious archaism. But in Quebec, where weighty words such as patrie (homeland) and destin (destiny) remain engraved in the political lexicon, he is simply un beau parleur- good talker.

Particularly when an acid remark is called for. Take the time in early 1995 when Landry sent reporters scurrying for their military-history primers with his refusal to follow then-premier Jacques Parizeau into a spring-and surely losing-referendum: "I do not wish to be the second-in-command of the Light Brigade." Or the time, a couple of years later, when he ridiculed then-Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin for trying to shame Quebec into renegotiating the Churchill Falls electricity partnership. "That contract," Landry told Tobin, "is as solid as the dam itself." Even when venom occasionally spews from the tempestuous Landry's mouth-witness his outburst in January about Quebec's refusal to "streetwalk for bits of red rag" (the Canadian flag, that is)-his choice of words is almost always entertaining, if not educational. Although neither stiff like Parizeau nor sullen like Lucien Bouchard, Landry shares with his predecessors a talent for disdain.

Landry's chief of staff once told an interviewer that his boss would become Premier the day he no longer wanted the job. "That's a bit what happened," the new Quebec Premier says in a rare pensive moment. Aged 63 and still shaken by the death from cancer of his wife, Lorraine, in 1999, Landry thought himself in the twilight of his political career. Then Lucien Bouchard suddenly announced in January he was quitting. Just as suddenly, the loyal second-in-command saw a chance to finally assume the commander's role. For someone not expecting the challenge, Landry has absorbed his new role completely. As Bouchard's all-powerful Minister of State for the Economy and Finance, Landry was indefatigable, juggling more responsibilities than five of his cabinet colleagues combined and far outlasting, on any given day, his less-burdened and much younger staff. But being thrust into the top job has made him even more vigorous. As he crisscrossed the province throughout February, Landry seemed to turn into a sort of eloquent Tasmanian devil.
Of course, it will take more than stamina if Landry is to prove a worthy torch-carrier for his party's cause. Bouchard's charisma proved a useful referendum-campaign tool, and his brooding looks made him a bit of a chick magnet. Landry-a shortish, physically unassuming fellow, with what seems to be a permanent facial rash-has neither of those traits. So, if Bouchard failed to reignite the sovereigntist flame among referendum-weary Quebec voters, it's hard to picture Landry doing so. Unless, of course, Landry succeeds where his predecessors failed in overcoming Quebeckers' primary reservation about sovereignty-its economic consequences. No one in the Parti Quebecois is more apt or equipped to do that than Landry. When polls confirm he is Quebeckers' hands-down favourite to replace Bouchard as the leader of the Parti Quebecois and Premier, it's because he oozes competence. And competence, as much as charisma, could prove an effective vote-catcher in a third referendum.

Landry was the first Finance chief in almost four decades to balance the provincial books. In his 2000 budget, he handed Quebeckers the biggest income tax cuts, as he likes to describe it, "since the existence of income tax." In the first half of the 2000-2001 fiscal year, the provincial coffers overflowed with $825 million more in revenue than Landry had expected, the fruit of a booming Quebec economy. Economic growth in the province surpassed the national average in 1999 for the first time in recent memory, and exceeded even the rosiest estimates last year. Unemployment is at its lowest level in a quarter-century. Private-sector investment has grown more than 50% since 1995, surpassing the rate in neighbouring Ontario. The world's 15th-largest economic power, as Landry insists on referring to his province, has never been, well, so powerful.

Of course, with a recession possible and spiralling health-care costs sucking up the surplus, the bloom could come off the fiscal fleur-de-lis at any time. Still, there is no denying Landry has demonstrated the discipline and determination his Liberal and Pequiste predecessors could never muster. Quebeckers remain the most indebted and taxed citizens in Canada. But in relative terms, they're less of both than they were before Landry took over the Finance Department in January, 1996. The fiscal mess Landry inherited was unprecedented in its proportions, and his options, considering Quebec's chronic economic underperformance, limited. Landry, who enjoyed in Bouchard the unbending confidence of a grateful boss, cut program spending for three consecutive years and shrank the public-sector payroll by about 20,000 workers.

Landry's tightfistedness and almost fanatical support for free trade have earned him the enmity of disaffected, left-wing elements in the Parti Quebecois, who accuse him of heartless, neoliberal governance a la Klein and Harris. And, measured against the teachers, artists and trade unionists that form the core of the PQ, Landry clearly is to the right of the party he leads. But calling him a neoliberal because he believes in balancing the books is like labelling Mike Harris a socialist for failing to privatize Ontario's liquor stores. Ask Landry to define himself and he will say he is a "progressive." A few years ago, he would have said "social democrat," but then Tony Blair came along and forced left-of-centre politicians everywhere to re-evaluate that label. "We [Pequistes] believe in the invisible hand of Adam Smith...but we also believe in the visible hand of solidarity to redistribute wealth. Ultraliberalism scares me. The rich only get richer and the poor poorer," Landry says. On the other hand, he chastises his critics on the left for failing to "respect the creators of wealth," and reminds them, in a rhyming voice, that "la social-democratie ne doit pas etre la social-gabegie." ("Social democracy should not be social chaos.")

The invisible-visible dichotomy-despite the obvious contradiction-is one Landry trots out a lot now. If anything, it illustrates his pragmatism. "You will rarely find him take a position that is anything but moderate. He is a middle-of-the-road politician," opines Louis Bernard, a former top bureaucrat in the Quebec government and one of Landry's closest friends and advisers. Still, Landry is a particular brand of centrist politician: He's from Quebec. Economist Pierre Fortin says Landry reminds him most of Robert Bourassa, the late Liberal premier, in his almost singular focus on Quebec's economic development and willingness to make liberal use of the levers of the state to achieve it. And in Quebec, those levers are powerful, from the $120-billion Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the omnipresent provincial pension-fund manager, to the recently revitalized (by Landry) Société générale de financement, an agency that invests directly in joint ventures with the private sector. Indeed, since "nationalizing" the vending machines on campus as president of the Université de Montréal's students' council in the early 1960s, Landry has demonstrated he is a meddler in the economy. He does not believe in natural selection.

"When one wants to move things along faster and develop a supremacy, yes, I believe in state intervention," Landry says. "I do believe it is the private sector that creates wealth. But, sometimes, the state can help create it." Of course, Landry's economics cannot be separated from his politics. His ultimate cause is as much an economic project as it is a cultural one. "Do you think," he asks, "if Ireland's economic policies were decided in London that Ireland would have surpassed Great Britain in per-capita GNP last year?"

The Celtic Tiger is a republic that broke from English rule, so it's understandable why it's an attractive model for Landry. Plus there's the fact that Ireland has been the developed world's hottest economy in recent years, having transformed itself from an agrarian backwater into a global high-tech hub. Finally, when Landry extols Ireland's success, he's tugging on the heartstrings of the estimated 40% of francophone Quebeckers who have Irish blood.

Ireland got to where it is with the help of enormous subsidies in the 1970s and 1980s from the European Union, similar to the equalization payments Ottawa sends to Quebec. But Ireland also implemented an aggressive, top-down industrial policy aimed at attracting foreign investment to the high-tech sector. The Irish government combined unbeatable corporate tax incentives to lure investors with relatively high personal income taxes to finance generous social programs. It is precisely the recipe Landry is trying to reproduce in Quebec. Quebeckers having "not yet made the judicious choice of sovereignty," there are limits to how far Landry can go. But he's doing what he can, he says, enumerating the tax incentives unveiled in his last budget. There's a 10-year tax holiday for "major investment projects"--those over $300 million or that create more than 350 jobs. The budget extended measures allowing firms to amortize investments in manufacturing or computer equipment at a rate of 125%. It also gave small businesses a tax credit worth 40% of the cost of creating a transactional web site.

The project Landry is most proud of, however, can be found in the bowels of Montreal, in a neighbourhood where Canada's industrialization began, but which progress left behind shortly thereafter. To bring it back, Landry has offered technology firms such irresistible tax breaks to move into the area, rechristened la Cité du multimedia, that half of the 10,000 jobs the project aimed to create over 10 years have been generated in less than two.

"Did you see it before?" Landry asks of the neighbourhood. "It was the symbol of Montreal's misery. Now, it is the symbol of its rebirth." Indeed, the construction of the Cité has reinvigorated the neighbourhood and bolstered Montreal's image as a high-tech hotbed. But at what cost? The corporate citizens of la Cité are eligible for annual tax credits of up to $15,000 to offset each employee's salary, plus a five-year holiday from provincial income, capital and payroll taxes. Landry estimates the government will hand out tax breaks worth $1 billion over 10 years to occupants of the complex and a handful of similar industrial parks. Another $1.5 billion in tax breaks over 10 years will be distributed to separate Montreal projects designed for e-commerce firms.

Critics disparage these kinds of targeted government initiatives. Usually, they say, such measures merely shift wealth from one sector to another, artificially prop up firms that wouldn't survive otherwise, and ultimately cost the government much more than it will garner in tax revenues from the jobs supposedly created. Not so, insists Ronald Brisebois, the CEO of Cognicase Inc., an information technology services company that leased 150,000 square feet of space in the Cité in January. Brisebois's company employs 850 at the Cité and expects to have about 1,300 by the end of 2001. Cognicase is on a bit of a roll, after having taken over National Bank of Canada's IT division last year. You'd expect it to be creating jobs without government help. "I guarantee you there wouldn't be as many," counters Brisebois. "The government is simply helping us gain a competitive advantage. There's a lot of competition trying to lure those workers to San Francisco. We have to make sure we keep our Wayne Gretzkys and Guy Lafleurs."

Indeed, Landry is a participant in a continent-wide poker match, wagering the government's largesse to attract investment. "My interventionist inspiration comes from the most capitalist nation in the world," he says. "Businesses come to me and say such-and-such U.S. state is offering them this or that [tax incentive] to invest there. They ask: What can Quebec do for me? Usually I have the right answer." Opines Fortin, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal: "Landry is like your standard U.S. governor. They're all chasing investment and Landry is just one among many. Where Landry is different is that he admits it openly while the others do it in secret."

This takes us back to the conviction politician. Since the Quiet Revolution, Quebec's leaders have believed it their obligation to harness the power of the state to ensure the survival and prosperity of the only francophone jurisdiction in North America. "Maitres chez nous," the brilliant election slogan of Jean Lesage's Liberals in 1962, was all about nationalizing hydroelectricity in the name of wresting control of Quebec's economy from outsiders and anglophones. Instead of watching corporate profits line the pockets of wealthy Westmount anglos, the state would reinvest a large chunk of them on behalf of the collectivity, turning a backward, poor and uneducated society into a modern industrial power with the most university graduates per capita on the continent. Local francophone entrepreneurs were favoured by the state-led capitalism of the 1970s and 1980s.

Of course, this strategy has meant that the size of the Quebec state has ballooned: Despite recent spending and tax cuts, government expenditures account for more than 22% of GDP in Quebec, compared to about 15% in neighbouring Ontario. The average Quebec family still pays about 25% more in income taxes than its Ontario counterpart. Yet there's no denying the success of the so-called Quebec model in making Quebeckers masters in their economic house. "You see what I have outside my window?" Landry asks, pointing to an adjacent office tower. "That's the headquarters of Power Corp. They watch me. I watch them. Power Corp. is a global company with its home in Quebec and Montreal. In fact, there are more ultimate economic centres of decision in Montreal than in Toronto. We've got Bombardier, Quebecor, Alcan."

There is a certain paradox at work in Landry. For someone who believes so wholeheartedly in open borders, he betrays protectionist reflexes when Quebec Inc. is faced by outside predators. There is still a worry, in Landry's mind, that left to the market alone, Quebeckers would lose control once more of their economy. Hence, he is a strident defender of the aggressive tactics of the Caisse de depot, most notoriously its ensuring that the province's dominant cable company, Vidéotron Ltée., stayed in Quebec hands (those of Quebecor) rather than being bought by Toronto-based Rogers Communications Inc. "The caisse," Landry said coyly, "cannot act like a lamb when it moves in a forest full of wolves."

Bay Street can expect more demonstrations of economic nationalism from a Landry government. In 1999, Landry vowed to block a reorganization of Canada's stock markets unless Quebec-based companies with market capitalizations of up to $500 million continued to trade on the Montreal Exchange. With his Finance Minister out of the country, a more conciliatory Bouchard hammered out a compromise under which companies with market caps of up to $4 million remained on the ME, while larger Quebec stocks gravitated to either the Toronto Stock Exchange or Canadian Venture Exchange. Landry was livid. But he had reason to gloat a few months later when Nasdaq, the technology-heavy U.S.-based stock market, chose Montreal over Toronto as its Canadian beachhead. This came after some arm-twisting by Landry and the promise of retroactive tax breaks as an occupant of one of the soon-to-be built e-commerce complexes.

Quebec has for so long played Ontario's poor cousin that Landry, a proud man, seems almost hell-bent on revenge. He remains convinced Ontario's advantages are not legitmately earned but the result of favourable treatment from the feds. He's still got a chip on his shoulder against Ottawa for negotiating the Auto Pact, the now-defunct Canada-U.S. agreement that enshrined free trade in the auto sector and turned Ontario into a car-making powerhouse. And he has committed to memory more statistics than one would have thought humanly possible to demonstrate that Quebec has been disadvantaged by the federal system. "The government of Canada throws all its weight behind the Ontario economy," Landry scoffs. "What else do you expect? The central government is dominated by Ontario." Quebeckers still receive more, on a per-capita basis, in federal transfers than they pay to Ottawa in income tax. But the gap is shrinking. From a recent peak of $1,654 in 1991, net transfers fell to $797 per person in 1998. For Landry, it is no consolation that equalization payments and employment insurance benefits are among the main reasons the balance remains in Quebec's favour. "I find it unacceptable that an economy like Quebec's--which is a knowledge-based economy responsible for half of Canada's high-tech exports--is that of a poor province."

Old-guard separatists like Landry have been denouncing the historical injustices visited on Quebec for so long now that there is something inevitably sclerotic and tedious about their discourse. To this Landry responds: "It is not because a grievance is old that it is false." Landry, more than anyone, knows just how old. He is the first leader of the PQ to have never been anything but a sovereigntist.

Jean-Bernard Landry grew up in Joliette, northeast of Montreal. He was pushed by parents obsessed with seeing their only son achieve more than his insurance-agent dad. Young Bernard did not disappoint. A history addict, painfully aware of the repressiveness of Duplessis-era Quebec, Landry gravitated toward politics. He was the founder and president of the student council at the College de Joliette. He occupied the same post at the Universite de Montreal, where, in the early 1960s, Landry organized a march to protest then-Canadian National president Donald Gordon's declaration that there weren't any francophones qualified for senior management at the railway. As a reservist in the Canadian Forces, Landry fought for and won the translation into French of all the Standing Orders and Queen's Regulations promulgated since Confederation.

After finishing his law degree at the Université de Montréal, Landry worked for Rene Lévesque, Quebec's then-Liberal natural resources minister. On his boss's advice, he was soon Paris-bound, to study economics at the tres snob Institut d'etudes politiques. There, his professors included Raymond Barre, who would later serve as France's Finance Minister and, briefly, Prime Minister. The relationship has proved a lasting one, and Barre is still the PQ's most ardent and high-profile apologist in France. Landry became friends with another future French Prime Minister, the Socialist Michel Rocard, when he and Levesque visited Paris in 1972. In addition to political views, Rocard and Landry found they shared another passion--sailing. They remain friends today.

When Landry returned from his studies in France, he went to work in the provincial bureaucracy. It was the height of the Quiet Revolution, and the mandarins-on-a-mission, led by Jacques Parizeau, loomed large. "It's there," Landry later told director Denys Arcand in a National Film Board documentary, "that I realized [Quebec's] problems are cruelly economic." He twice ran for the PQ in Joliette before finally winning a Laval seat in 1976. Landry immediately landed a key cabinet post: Economic Development Minister.

Business leaders squirmed at the PQ's anti-scab legislation and stiff French-first rules in the workplace. They feared nationalization of key industries. Hundreds of companies simply picked up and left. From the outset, Landry was apologist for his party. In 1979, he tabled a blueprint of the government's economic strategy that emphasized the role of the private sector. Called "Building Quebec," the policy advocated using Hydro-Quebec's cheap energy to attract manufacturers and offering extensive government support for entrepreneurs.

After the PQ government's re-election in 1981, Landry convinced Levesque to create a new trade ministry and let him run it. In another seminal policy document, "The Technological Shift," Landry promoted high-tech exports as the key to Quebec's prosperity. The paper foresaw Landry's key economic preoccupations in the coming years-high-tech innovation and free trade. A disciple of Joseph Schumpeter's theory of "creative destruction," Landry was moved by the Austrian-born economist's insistence on the role of entrepreneurs as agents of progress, forcing change through innovation. Landry, a voracious reader, was also persuaded by the ideas of Lester Thurow, the guru of U.S. industrial-policy advocates in the 1980s. Under these influences, Quebec introduced what are widely considered to be the most generous R&D tax incentives on the continent.

In 1983, when the idea was still heresy in most circles, Landry openly pushed for Quebec to enter a common market with the United States and, if it cared to join, the rest of Canada too. At the time, he was at odds with his party, whose close ties to the union movement made it a free-trade foe. Only through years of persuasion was Landry able to make free trade a central plank of the sovereigntists' platform. The logic was obvious: Free trade prevented Ottawa from threatening to erect a tariff wall around an independent Quebec. Landry's 1983 proposal for one-on-one negotiations between Quebec and Washington drew an immediate rebuke from the State Department, but he was unbowed. After an unsuccessful run at the PQ leadership in 1985 and the party's defeat at the polls the same year, he published Trade Without Borders while a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1987. He defended his thesis in some 200 speeches across the province. In 1988, despite his party's official neutrality, Landry campaigned for Brian Mulroney's Conservatives in the election that became a plebiscite on free trade.

These days, the trade concept that Landry is pushing is a European-style "confederal union" between an independent Quebec and Canada. He has little chance of convincing Quebeckers to take the plunge unless he can assuage their insecurity about the economics of sovereignty. "To be afraid, when you are the world's 15th economic power, well, it's absurd," Landry asserts. "I've just returned from Davos--for the sixth time-where there is every capitalist on the Earth. This time, I've come back with $500 million [in investment commitments]. No one mentioned Quebec's political status. Because they know what I'm doing here and I know why they invest here-skilled workforce, low operating costs, abundant and affordable electricity and the support of my government." Landry is self-congratulatory about his success as an investment catcher. Capital expenditures in the private sector rose to $27.4 billion last year from $17.9 billion in 1995, and have grown at a faster rate than in Ontario. And the level of Quebec's non-residential fixed assets-essentially, productive capacity-now equals Ontario's on a per-capita basis.

Still, Quebec's economy is like a glass that's half full. The province still fails to draw anywhere close to its share of foreign direct investment (7% in 1999), but still counts far more than its share (35% in December) of the country's unemployed. And growth in total private and public investment is expected to slow to 0.5% this year, according to Statistics Canada, compared to 5.2% in Ontario. Although Landry slashed personal income taxes by $4.5 billion over three years in his last budget, subsequent cuts by Mike Harris left the chasm between the provinces unchanged. With a debt of more than $100 billion, escalating health-care costs, some of the most generous social programs in the country-and a slowing economy to top it off-there are few prospects that the gap will be narrowed soon.

Then, there is another liability. Landry's blemished face turns a positively maple-leaf hue at anglophone media innuendo that a racist streak runs through him. And, indeed, the suggestion seems ludicrous for anyone who knows Landry, a Hispanophile world traveller who has taught in Mexico and Africa, and who served for years as the PQ's chief emissary among the province's "cultural communities." Yet, he has an awkward way of showing his openness. "Our winters are white. Adding a lot of colours can only be a good thing for us," he said recently. It might be an elegant turn of phrase. But it perpetuates the us-and-them reputation that has plagued the sovereigntists. Declarations like it, and the "red rag" remark, do not ingratiate Landry to the moderate Quebeckers he needs so desperately to convince in his sovereigntist crusade.

Landry, despite his conceit, is not insensitive to his shortcomings. Asked to account for his occasional bombast, Landry turns to-what else?-poetry. "Confieso que he vivido," he confides, appropriating the title of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's autobiography, I Confess I Have Lived, a pun on the I-confess-I-have-sinned of the confessional. With that kind of charm and Landry's economic smarts, the PQ may have unwittingly found its most potent weapon yet.

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