MONTREAL — Pierre Fitzgibbon’s dubious stroll into Quebec’s history books took roughly two minutes. 

On Nov. 12, Quebec’s National Assembly voted on a motion to censure Fitzgibbon, the province’s minister of economy and innovation, for “placing himself in a situation where his personal interest could influence his independence of judgment in the exercise of his office,” as Quebec’s ethics commissioner wrote in a report. After a fanfare-free roll call, the motion passed, marking the first time in Quebec’s parliamentary history that its National Assembly sanctioned a government minister.

There were other astounding bits in Fitzgibbon’s legislative comeuppance. The entirety of the National Assembly, including all members of Fitzgibbon’s own Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), supported the motion—save for Fitzgibbon himself, who abstained from the vote. That included Premier François Legault, who plucked the former executive from the ranks of Quebec Inc. to run under the CAQ banner in 2018.

Yet perhaps the most astonishing thing is there hasn’t been much in the way of comeuppance for Fitzgibbon at all. By dint of his personality and his role as economic minister, Fitzgibbon is perhaps the most outsized personification of the unapologetically swaggering, business-minded Quebec nationalism espoused by the CAQ government. 

The mandate of Investissement Québec (IQ) has expanded in both scope and budget under Fitzgibbon’s legislative guidance, who further ensured that his ministry had more say over the investment arm of the Quebec government, which has $12.1 billion of assets under management. He has been the face of the province’s COVID-19 business-relief effort, as well as its battery and electrification strategy. Columnist Michel Girard has called Fitzgibbon “omnipresent.” Politically speaking, it seems he’s bulletproof, as well—and it sounds like he knows it. 

“People who know Pierre Fitzgibbon, people who are close to me, know I’m not in some sort of conflict of interest,” Fitzgibbon told me recently. He blamed “the aquarium of politics” for hyping the incidents, before calling the ethics commissioner’s office “obsolete” and in need of an overhaul. “I’m here to do a job, one that’s energizing and motivating. I do a pretty good job, and I think Mr. Legault is satisfied. The day he isn’t, I’ll leave.”

Indeed, Legault remains securely Velcroed to his minister, even as the latter has dragged the government from one ethical scandal to the next. “He learned his lesson,” Legault said upon the release of that ethics commissioner’s report, which detailed Fitzgibbon’s faux pas of selling shares in a company to a lobbyist who was also soliciting the CAQ government.

Just over a month later, when the ethics commissioner again took issue with Fitzgibbon, this time for failing to divest stocks in companies that did business with the state, Legault doubled down. “Quebec is lucky to have someone as competent as Pierre Fitzgibbon in its government,” he said, the ink barely dry on the report.

Then came White Star Capital. Last week, the Journal de Montréal resurfaced a 2019 photo from Legault’s Twitter account of Fitzgibbon and Legault with Eric Martineau-Fortin, co-founder of the New York-based technology investment firm. The issue is that Fitzgibbon was and remains a shareholder in White Star Capital, which, as the Journal helpfully pointed out, had lobbied Quebec’s economic ministry and Investissement Québec for a $20-million investment. (Both the Caisse and IQ invested in White Star, according to PitchBook data.)

All told, Fitzgibbon’s holdings, as well as his intervention in 2019 to secure financial aid from IQ for an unnamed company in which he had an interest, violated three articles of the National Assembly’s ethics code, according to a December ethics commissioner report. It is the third such report written about Fitzgibbon’s intermingling political and business dealings—and there’s a fourth on the way, ethics commission spokesperson Anne-Sophie St-Gelais told me. 

But again, the premier shrugged his shoulders. Fitzgibbon, he said, “is an asset.” Asked whether he knew of his minister’s investment in a company that had lobbied his government, Legault shrugged again. “I don’t know all [his] investments off by heart,” he said.

In part, anyway, Legault’s insouciance to his minister’s gobsmacking chutzpah speaks to the CAQ government’s gravity-defying popularity. Despite having the country’s highest levels of infection in the pandemic’s early months, Quebecers have remained largely loyal to Legault and his party throughout the last year. 

And Legault, in turn, remains loyal to Fitzgibbon. “Fitz is a critical part of the government’s economic management of the COVID crisis, so we need his expertise,” a CAQ source told me. Part of this has been the COVID-19 business-relief program, which has Investissement Québec doling out $1.68 billion in loans and subsidies to Quebec’s small- and medium-sized businesses.

It helps, too, that Fitzgibbon is a former boardroom denizen of the likes of National Bank Financial, PwC, Cycle Capital and the Caisse. “Fitzgibbon was recruited for his Rolodex,” former Liberal finance minister Carlos Leitão told me. 

Some companies that have worked with Fitzgibbon appreciate the private-sector speed he brings to the public service. “He negotiated tight, and it wasn’t always easy. But for us, he’s been really good. He’s a guy who makes things move forward,” Lion Electric vice-president Patrick Gervais told me. The fruit of this speed was a $50-million investment from the Quebec government for Lion’s new battery-manufacturing facility. The federal government was notably slower to pony up.

Fitzgibbon also brings a businessman’s sharp elbows to the profession. After Parti Québécois MNA Martin Ouellet criticized Fitzgibbon in the media for appearing on Quebec’s talk-show circuit as the pandemic raged, he received a flurry of angry texts from the minister. “He didn’t appreciate it,” Ouellet told me, describing Fitzgibbon’s texts as “impulsive, incisive and emotional, but not insulting.”

When I contacted Fitzgibbon to chat, he sent me, apropos of nothing, a cover story I’d written for Maclean’s more than a decade ago featuring Bonhomme Carnaval, a money-hemorrhaging briefcase and the title “The Most Corrupt Province In Canada.” (Incidentally, the article was about corruption within Quebec’s political class.)

We spoke for about 20 minutes. Fitzgibbon was expansive, talking about getting into politics, his vision of Quebec’s interventionist model, in which the province invests in strategic sectors like aluminum, aerospace and technology; the near-obsessive with the province’s productivity, and how it consistently lags behind that of Ontario and the U.S.; and the need to create wealth by way of productivity and innovation, not taxes, to fund health care and education in the province. 

“In Quebec, we are poorer than those in Ontario and the U.S. How do we close that gap? By creating companies that are more innovative, and that requires a certain interventionism. So in terms of access to capital for worthy projects, there’s virtually no limit.”

In short, it was the Coles Notes version of the CAQ mantra, the nationalist brand of conservatism that would nonetheless be considered nanny-state prattle by conservatives south of the border. And it is enduringly popular here, in large part because Fitzgibbon is the one standing at the spigots, proclaiming Quebec is open for business. 

“I’m tired of the ethics commissioner thing,” he told me. “People who are close to me look at this and say, ‘Pierre, you’re courageous.’ But I think I can help, and I committed to it, and when I do that, I never let go.”

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.” @MartinPatriquin