SUMMARY
This text sets aside politics, ideology, and image to define what governing actually requires today: proven leadership at the highest levels, mastery of real power, the ability to negotiate under pressure, transform complex organizations, confront dysfunction, and take responsibility for difficult change. It ends with a direct call to those who possess these capabilities to step forward, not to build a political career, but to give back and govern when it matters.
IF I HAD TO CHOOSE A PREMIER FOR QUEBEC
If I had to choose the person who would become Premier of Quebec, this is exactly what I would look for.
I would deliberately set aside party affiliation, political background, ideology, and electoral choreography. I would focus exclusively on whether the individual is capable of governing in the real world as it exists today.
What follows is not a political platform.
It is a leadership standard.
THE PROFILE I WOULD REQUIRE
The individual would have demonstrated a career at the highest levels of responsibility, most likely in the private or institutional sectors, including:
- Senior leadership of complex organizations
- Sustained exposure to international environments
- Proven authority exercised over real power, not symbolic roles
No prior political experience would be required.
ESSENTIAL CAPABILITIES
The candidate must be able to negotiate with anyone, without exception, including individuals who employ aggressive, manipulative, deceptive, or destabilizing tactics, while maintaining full strategic control of the situation.
In addition, the individual must have demonstrated the ability to:
- Lead high-stakes strategic negotiations in environments defined by real power imbalances
- Govern and transform large organizations involving international partners and stakeholders
- Repeatedly reinvent themselves across different industries, cultures, political systems, and power structures
- Achieve clear and difficult objectives while preserving strict strategic confidentiality
- Communicate complex ideas, articulate credible long-term visions, and make initially implausible goals understandable and actionable
- Identify, contain, and neutralize malicious actors within both private and public organizations
- Manage media exposure and public messaging without becoming captive to it
- Reduce complex problems to their essential core and act with precision and decisiveness
- Operate effectively within dysfunctional or toxic organizations and convert them into visible successes
- Communicate hard, disruptive, and unavoidable change while maintaining engagement at all levels
To Those Who Know How to Govern
An appeal to the women and men capable of transforming Quebec, now
There are people who are more capable than others.
Individuals who have demonstrated, through action, their ability to transform their environment, to make systems more effective, more coherent, and above all more aligned with the real needs of people.
These people exist. I know this.
I have worked with them. I have seen them make difficult decisions under pressure, without ideology, without performance, guided by a single compass: responsibility.
They are women and men able to intervene where organizations become confused, inefficient, or toxic, and to turn them into visible successes. Not through rhetoric, but through mastery, discipline, and an understanding of real power dynamics.
Today, Quebec needs you. Now.
Not to build a political career, but to give back what you have learned, what you have built, what you understand about real power and its constraints.
This is not an invitation.
It is a call.
If you recognize yourself in this profile, this text is addressed to you.
And if you hesitate, ask yourself one question: if not you, then who?
AJH