QUEBEC CITY -- The vast majority of polls commissioned by the government and financed by taxpayers were related to the management of COVID-19, Quebec Premier Francois Legault said Thursday at a news scrum.

Legault said no less than 92 per cent of the surveys commissioned by his government were aimed at better managing the health crisis and adjusting measures as needed, depending on the mood of citizens. He did not mention what the other 8 per cent were about.

He, therefore, feels he has nothing to be ashamed of, despite pressure from the opposition parties to have the auditor general investigate the extensive use of polls by the executive council and to see the questions and answers associated with these opinion polls.

"It was very important to know the reaction of Quebecers to our measures, so that we could adjust them over the past 15 months," he said.

He did not respond to the opposition's request to make the polls' questions and answers that his team commissioned public.

Since its election in 2018, the CAQ government has multiplied population polls. The bill has shot to between $600,000 and $1 million in public funds, an expense deemed "astronomical" by official opposition Liberal leader Dominique Anglade.

Legault, however, denied the $1 million figure for polls, a number that has been circulating in the media.

QUEBEC CITY-LEVIS TUNNEL

Meanwhile, the controversial tunnel to be built between Quebec City and Levis monopolized much of question period in the National Assembly on Thursday.

In a news scrum and then in the Salon Bleu, Legault once again defended the construction of the Quebec-Levis tunnel, a $10-billion megaproject contested by the three opposition parties.

He tried to put the opposition on the defensive, by shining a spotlight on the apparent contradiction between the position of the Liberal leader, who denounced the tunnel project as pharaonic and an "electoral Taj Mahal", and that of Saint-Laurent Liberal MNA Marwah Rizqy, who is responsible for the Quebec City file, who spoke in favour of a third link between Quebec City and Levis.

In a news conference, Anglade did not want to say clearly whether she only rejected the tunnel project announced by the government or whether she objected to the very principle of a third link between the two shores of the St. Lawrence River.

One thing is certain regarding her support for third link, it will be necessary "to demonstrate a real need for mobility."

"When you want to do a major infrastructure project, you have to rely on data, on facts, on evaluations, on possible options, on risk analyses, but we didn't have any of that," she said.

-- this report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on May 27, 2021.