MONTREAL — By all credible accounts, the planned $7-billion, eight-kilometre tunnel under Quebec City is objectively dumb, a needlessly expensive folly. It is also a monument to Quebec Premier François Legault’s singular influence over the federal election.

Should the project go ahead, the Quebec government says the troisième lien (“third link”) will ferry some 50,000 cars a day between Quebec City’s downtown core and the bedroom community to its south—one that, being comparatively small, disproportionately rural and generally older than the rest of the province, manifestly doesn’t need it. Experts say it will precipitate urban sprawl and increase carbon emissions.

But Legault wants it, and these days, what Legault wants, Legault gets. Quebec’s outsized political footprint is the stuff of Canadian cliché. Yet since his election in 2018, the 64-year-old premier has managed to conserve Quebec’s favoured-son status while essentially eliminating the separatist threat that maintained it for so long. And his right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Québec party’s success also put to rest the trope of Quebec as the country’s pinko reprieve. 

You might call him the anti-Doug Ford. Like Ford, Legault is a populist conservative premier elected who stands in stark contrast to his Liberal predecessors. Unlike Ford, Legault has remained in voters’ good graces even as he implemented decidedly unpopulist measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. Quebec is the province of curfews, lockdowns and vaccine passports, and yet by pollster Angus Reid’s measure he’s the most popular premier in the country, with a 66 per cent approval rating. Ford could barely explain his own stay-at-home order and was steadfastly against vaccine passports before suddenly being for them. Ontarians have apparently taken notice.

And Legault’s enduring, even confounding popularity has made his laundry list of demands required reading for anyone vying to lead the country. It’s why Erin O’Toole twice name-checked Legault during the first French-language debate last Thursday. And it’s why most federal leaders are promising to throw money at the blinding white elephant that is the troisième lien. 

The Conservative Party has pledged to pay for 40 per cent of the thing—as per Legault’s request to any party that forms the next government—with outgoing CPC MP Pierre Paul-Hus framing the project as a volley against “the war on cars.” And notably absent from the 2021 Conservative platform is the party’s 2019-era pledge to build a “National Energy Corridor” (read: pipeline) from one ocean to another. 

The omission is a nod to Legault, who doesn’t like what he calls Western Canada’s “dirty energy.” Translation: for the sake of appeasing Legault, Conservative Leader Eric O’Toole, the otherwise proud petrolhead, is folding himself into the Quebec premier’s pretzel-like conceit as far as the third link goes: yes to cars, particularly trucks and SUVs, but no to the stuff you need to put in them. (The province, it should be noted, was the first to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars, effective as of 2035, despite what Quebec Environment Minister Benoît Charette told me was “considerable” resistance from the auto lobby.)

And while Justin Trudeau has questioned the project’s “social acceptability,” the Liberal Party declared itself open to possibly paying for the troisième lien’s two planned public-transit lanes. The Liberals donned this fig leaf just under a month after bestowing a $6-billion, no-strings-attached investment in Quebec’s daycare system. “Legault and Trudeau speak every week,” a CAQ source told me, saying the relationship is “practical to deliver things for Quebec.” (This hasn’t stopped Legault from offering a lukewarm endorsement of O’Toole.)

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, meanwhile, managed to keep a straight face when he said the troisième lien would have a “positive environmental potential.” Only NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has resisted the love-in. “We’re against this project,” Singh said recently—while campaigning in Alberta, several thousand kilometres away from the NDP’s lone Quebec seat.

Key to Legault’s popularity is Legault himself. Like vast swaths of his fellow baby boomers in the province, he is a formerly staunch indépendentiste whose enthusiasm for the cause waned amid its myriad failures and setbacks. His current brand of Quebec-first nationalism, with its tacit admission that Quebec sovereignty is the God that failed, perfectly encapsulates the nebulous indifference many Quebecers feel when it comes to the great, big, mostly English pasture beyond its borders.

His voter base is resolutely pan-partisan as a result. According to an analysis by pollster Philippe Fournier, the CAQ draws support in roughly equal measure from supporters of the three major federal parties: 31 per cent Liberal, 24 per cent Bloc and 23 per cent Conservative. This means no party can afford to alienate Legault, lest they lose their share of the pie. (The NDP scores a paltry seven per cent, which might explain Singh’s refreshing candor.)

And with the Bloc Québécois, Legault is the only premier with a federal party telegraphing his priorities to Ottawa, which apart from financing the troisième lien include more health funding, less bilingualism and a blunt request to stay out of Quebec affairs. “Mind your business, and cut a cheque,” as Blanchet put it recently.

There is a finger-kissing bit of irony with the troisième lien. The Quebec City maw of the planned project, through which those 50,000 cars will enter and exit, is set to open near the Centre Vidéotron, which is perhaps the province’s current biggest white elephant this side of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. In 2011, the then-Liberal Quebec government passed a law giving media conglomerate Quebecor naming rights and control over the $400-million public building, in hopes of attracting an NHL franchise.

That franchise has yet to materialize, despite Legault’s best efforts. If only his audience were other politicians, not NHL suits. After all, in the political arena, what Legault wants, Legault gets.