The awareness campaign has been entitled Are you Karaok to drive? For the media launch, we had the idea of inviting journalists to experiment with field activity themselves: they should interpret songs with modified words, supposed to encourage responsible driving. It had to happen Friday afternoon, on the Grande Allée, in the midst of Quebec Summer Festival.
It didn’t happen. Thursday, Geneviève Guilbault forced the cancellation of the media launch of the campaign imagined by the Société de l’assurance Automobile du Québec (SAAQ). After having dismissed the CEO and promised to clean up once and for all, the Minister of Transport hardly attacked the organization, seeing in this case an “obvious lack of judgment” on her part.
I do not know for you, but in this case, I do not find the lack of judgment so obvious that that. Okay, the play on words is excruciating. And then, it’s true, inviting journalists to sing during a press event is a bit bizarre. Usually, we keep that for our annual congress.
If the media launch has been canceled, the prevention campaign is maintained. This summer, the SAAQ will therefore tend its karaoke micro at the crowd in the various festivals of Quebec.
You can be annoyed by the moralizing side of the concept, but it is characteristic of awareness campaigns. Trying to convince the right people not to take the wheel with a drink in the nose, it is part of the Mandate of the SAAQ.
It has nothing to do with the fiasco peeled by the Gallant Commission. Employees, who only do their job, do not deserve to be rebuilt in this way.
Have they been awkward? Maybe, a little. The fact remains that we have seen lack of judgment far more obvious than that. The painful stubbornness of the Caquist government to promise the third link, for example …
It was learned this week that Minister Guilbault claimed $ 275 million to launch the planning of the megaprojet in which no one believes, even though her government scraped her drawers of drawers to predict hospitals in a state of advanced decrepitude.
The third link could cost up to 9.3 billion. And Minister Guilbault rushes against the advice of urban planning experts, who kill themselves to repeat that the project does not hold water. She wants to spend a maximum of public funds in the hope of putting a next government before the fait accompli and preventing it from backing up.
The most desperate is that not only will the third link not reduce road congestion, but Geneviève Guilbault also rejects any other measure likely to achieve it.
No question of improving the river link, for example, or adding a reversible path on the Pierre-Laporte bridge, since these measures “no longer frame with the objectives of the current project”, we read in the memory presented to the Council of Ministers and quoted by Radio-Canada.
To the devil the solutions proven to unclog the capital; We only swear by a hypothetical, chimerical third link. In the spring, the government lamentably abandoned the idea of developing routes reserved for public transport in the suburbs of the capital. What do you want, we must “respect the capacity to pay taxpayers”, dixit the office of Minister Guilbault.
The same which is about to draw 275 million from the taxpayers’ pockets to finance a mirage.
“It is obvious that they will save time,” said Geneviève Guilbault in June about motorists who will borrow the third link between Lévis and Quebec.
However, that either, it’s not as easy as it looks.
In reality, the more roads we build, the more road traffic increases – and congestion, at the same time. This phenomenon of “induced traffic” has been measured and documented around the world. It has been decades that its existence no longer debated – at least, between those who studied these questions.
You still have to take the trouble to listen to them …
This is not what the Caquist government does. He knowingly ignores the unfavorable studies in his project – one recent, showing that the selected layout will only save 2 minutes 18 seconds to motorists. At best.
The government does not take the trouble to consult the study which he himself commanded at CDPQ infra in 2024, according to which a new interim link will not improve mobility in the Quebec region.
The height is that the caquists are not listed themselves. “We have no data that would justify the establishment of a highway tunnel between the two city centers,” admitted Geneviève Guilbault in April 2023, when buried the project-today resurrected in another form. “If there had been a need, if the figures had demonstrated the need, it would have been done. »»
What has changed today? Nothing. We are now told about economic security, but we have to face the facts, since it is blinding: it is in the only hope of ensuring the security of a handful of caquis seats that the government persists in making this disproportionate, ruinous and frozen project in another century.
