2010/12/02

Charest on primetime TV

Tout le monde en parle is a popular talk show on Radio-Canada. Broadcast weekly, it regularly draws over a million viewers from a potential audience of 7.8 million (BBM numbers do not take French Canadians from other provinces into account).

Last Tuesday, I heard on the radio that Premier Charest was going to be on the show this coming Sunday. With his recent lost at the Kamouraska by-election, disastrous polls and all the bad press he's been getting, I wondered what he could rely on to pull a positive performance from the show.

I got my answer this afternoon in La Presse [Google translation]. According to Raymon Bachand, Minister of Finance, the government is heading for a deficit of $3.1B instead of the $4.2B initially planned. That's a 25% reduction! That would be very good news if it weren't for the opposition pointing out that these new numbers are mostly the result of creative accounting. They're putting forward that provincial debt this year will, in fact, increase by $10B [Google translation].

Why would the government make such a shoddy attempt at spinning public opinion?... I wondered. And then it struck me... the recording of Charest's appearance at Tout le monde en parle is tonight. Is this just a coincidence or am I being paranoid?