It's nothing short of astounding.

The first 100 days of the Parti Quebecois government has been an unmitigated disaster.

The not-ready-for-primetime players have screwed it up at every turn. I don't think anyone could have imagined it would be this bad.

The Marois government has left a trail of broken promises, policy reversals, bad judgement and double-dipping.

How do you find Pauline Marois in a snowstorm? Just backtrack.

 

Ministerial mistakes

There was the Boisclair affair. The former leader and erstwhile chouchou of the PQ was appointed Quebec's delegate general to New York, a nice job that pays $170,000 each year.

In the same breath he was also given a job-for-life as an assistant deputy minister at about $150,000 per annum. Only when the media learned of his two jobs did the Premier back down.

Jean-Francoise Lisee, the new best-friend-forever of Quebec Anglos.

It seems he was content to take the PQ cabinet salary plus a salary from the Universite de Montreal.

It was only after La Presse broke the story that our BFF renounced the second salary of $8666 a month. He’ll be donating it to charity.

Nicolas Girard, former PQ MNA was defeated in the last election.

He was appointed to run the AMT, at a salary of $183,000 per year.

Girard has never run anything, let alone a metropolitan transit agency with an annual budget of $314 million.

Here's the kicker: we found out this week that Girard has kept the former AMT boss on as a special advisor, so we have two AMT CEO's.

I guess one has to explain to the other how the train set works.

Add to this mix the really bad judgement in appointing a convicted fraudster as environment minister.

What a mess that was, and to make it work our premier had the audacity to say she didn't regret appointing him.

 

Forget the economy, there's a language war

There was the health tax fiasco, the retroactive tax mess, and how about giving the pot-banging students exactly what they wanted and more, and then having the PQ government slash university funding.

For good measure the government announced a full frontal attack on its English-speaking residents by treating us as foreigners

They are proposing new rules for making small business run in French, and calling for the creation of squads of language vigilantes, or as the minister calls them, sentries in the defence of the language. (I’m not sure if pitchforks will be provided.)

Don’t forget mean-spirited threats to take away bilingual status from English-speaking municipalities.

 

The more we know each other...

I think one thing that should be on all of our Christmas lists this year is the wish for an election sometime in 2013.

Forget the miracle on 34th street, I would take a miracle on the Grande Allee.

But I think there may be a way out of this language angst.

A new survey out this week finds that the more francophones get to know us, the less they feel threatened.

The more the blokes they know, the more comfortable they become.

So let's get out there.

From Hochelaga-Maisonneuve to the Beauce to the shores of Lac St Jean, we can put ourselves up for adoption, or at least for weekend visits.

At the end of the day everyone may find we have more in common than anyone might imagine.