Leadership Quote by Pauline Marois

A politician insisting sovereignty “was not an issue” while immediately reciting “sovereignty numbers” is the kind of strategic denial that only makes sense inside a campaign war room. Pauline Marois is performing triage: calming jittery voters and donors who fear another referendum-sized rupture, while signaling to the Parti Quebecois base that the project hasn’t been shelved. The repetition of “sovereignty” functions like a reassurance mantra. It’s not on the ballot, she implies, but it’s still in the bloodstream.

The line is also a neat bit of rhetorical rebranding. By reducing sovereignty to “numbers,” Marois shifts the conversation from identity and destiny to polling, from moral urgency to market research. That move buys her flexibility. If the campaign’s immediate path to power requires talk of jobs, budgets, or “good government,” she can claim she never made sovereignty the headline. If the base demands proof of ideological fidelity, she can point to those “numbers” as evidence that the cause remains “alive.”

The final clause reveals the real stakes: “work to do to convince Quebecers.” It casts sovereignty less as a settled conviction than as a sales problem - persuasion, messaging, groundwork. Subtext: the movement is intact but not ascendant; the electorate is not hostile, just unconvinced. Marois positions herself as the manager of a long game, postponing the dramatic moment while keeping the machinery warmed up. The sentence is a bridge between pragmatism and promise, built out of careful ambiguity.