Pauline Marois (French: [pɔlin maʁwa]; born March 29, 1949) is a retired Canadian politician who served as the 30th premier of Quebec from 2012 to 2014. Marois had been a member of the National Assembly in various ridings since 1981 as a member of the Parti Québécois (PQ), serving as party leader from 2007 to 2014. She is the first female premier of Quebec.
Born in a working-class family, Marois studied social work at Université Laval, married businessman Claude Blanchet and became an activist in grassroots organizations and in the Parti Québécois (a social democratic party advocating Quebec's independence). After accepting political jobs in ministerial offices, she was first elected as a member of the National Assembly in 1981. At age 32, she was appointed to the cabinet for the first time as a junior minister in the René Lévesque government.
After being defeated as a PQ candidate in La Peltrie in the 1985 general election and in a by-election in 1988, she was elected as the member of the Quebec National Assembly for Taillon in the 1989 general election. With the return of the PQ to government in 1994, premiers Parizeau, Bouchard and Landry appointed Marois to senior positions in the Quebec cabinet. She was instrumental in crafting policies to end confessional school boards in the public education system, she restructured the tuition system in post-secondary education, implemented a subsidized daycare program, instituted pharmacare and parental-leave plans and slashed the Quebec deficit under Premier Bouchard's "deficit zero" agenda. In 2001, Premier Landry appointed her Deputy Premier of Quebec, becoming the third woman after Lise Bacon and Monique Gagnon-Tremblay to assume the second-highest role in the provincial government.
Following two failed leadership runs in 1985 and 2005, Marois briefly left political life in 2006. A year later, she stood unopposed to become the seventh leader of the Parti Québécois on June 26, 2007. From 2008 to 2012, she served as leader of the Official Opposition. In spite of internal strife in 2011 and early 2012, where she survived several challenges to her leadership from prominent members of her caucus – earning her the nickname Dame de béton, "Concrete Lady" – she led the Parti Québécois to victory with a minority government in the 2012 Quebec general election, thus becoming the first female premier in the province's history.
As Premier, Marois closed down Quebec's only nuclear reactor and ended asbestos production in Quebec. Her government's highest profile initiative was the proposal of a controversial Quebec Charter of Values which would have banned the province's 600,000 government employees from wearing religious symbols including turbans, Islamic veils and Jewish kippahs. However, the crucifix (notably, the one hung by above the speaker's chair in the provincial legislature) would not have been banned under the Quebec Charter of Values. Her party was defeated 19 months later in the 2014 Quebec general election, an election that she herself had called. Marois was personally defeated in the riding of Charlevoix–Côte-de-Beaupré and announced thereafter her resignation as PQ leader. Her electoral defeat marked the shortest stay of any Quebec provincial government since the Canadian Confederation and the lowest showing for the PQ since its first general election in 1970.
Marois was born at Saint-François d'Assise Hospital in Limoilou, a working-class neighborhood of Quebec City. A daughter of Marie-Paule (née Gingras) and Grégoire Marois, a heavy machinery mechanic, she is the oldest of five children. She was raised in a small two-story brick house built by her father in Saint-Étienne-de-Lauzon, a village now amalgamated with the city of Lévis, facing the provincial capital on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River.
According to Marois, her parents were nationalists and devout Catholics, but remained rather uninvolved politically. Her mother's efforts to have the family recite the Holy Rosary at night generally lasted for two or three days. Marois has recalled that her father was sympathetic to the ideas of the Social Credit and the Union Nationale party; he kept current with the news and even bought the family a television set in the early 1950s.
During her youth, Marois recalls in her autobiography, published in 2008, her parents had "profound intuitions", and although her father regretted his own lack of status and education, he was ready to sacrifice to get a decent education for his children. Her three brothers, Denis, Robert and Marc, and her sister, Jeannine, would all graduate with university degrees.
She first attended the small parish school in nearby Saint-Rédempteur, where Marois recalls that she excelled in French, history and geography, developed an interest for reading and received numerous books as prizes for her academic achievements. At the age of 12, she was enrolled at Collège Jésus-Marie de Sillery, an exclusive, all-girl, Catholic private school attended by the offspring of the local bourgeoisie, an episode she describes as a "culture shock", leaving a permanent mark on her outlook and future choices.
According to her autobiography, Marois became aware of her lower social status in school and in the affluent houses of Sillery, where she sometimes gave a hand to her mother, who did housecleaning jobs to pay tuition. She was active in school clubs and describes herself as a good student, although she failed her English and Latin classes, momentarily putting her place in school in jeopardy.
In 1968, she enrolled in the social work undergraduate program at Quebec City's Université Laval. At the time, Marois recalls, she was more interested in the condition of the poor and in international issues than other issues such as the status of the French language or the Quebec independence movement. According to her autobiography, she participated in a study on housing in the city's Lower Town and demonstrated against the Vietnam War.
The next year, she married Claude Blanchet, a young man from a nearby village and her high school sweetheart. Despite their differences – Blanchet was a budding entrepreneur who bought his first gas station at the age of 17, while a student in business administration — the young couple began a lifelong relationship.
In September 1970, she got an internship in Hull, where she helped with the creation of a local chapter of the Association coopérative d'économie familiale (ACEF) — a consumer advocacy group — while her husband was hired by Campeau Corporation, a real estate developer part of Power Corporation. At the time, the region was rapidly expanding due to the growth of the federal bureaucracy and the construction of administrative buildings on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River was met with opposition, according to Marois, because it did not take "into account the needs and the housing conditions of the local population."
This internship, which coincided with the October Crisis and her return to Quebec City to graduate at the spring of 1971, had a profound impact on Marois. "I arrived in the Outaouais as a French Canadian. I left the region identifying forever as a Quebecer", she declared in her 2008 autobiography, Québécoise!.
While gaining experience with several community organizations including launching CFVO-TV, a community television station in the Outaouais region, she lectured for some time in social work at the Cégep de Hull, and took a job as CEO of a CLSC. She also volunteered with the Parti Québécois, delivering barbecue chicken to election workers on election day in 1973. After moving to Montreal in July, she pursued a master of business administration (MBA) degree from HEC Montréal, where she took two classes with economist Jacques Parizeau. After graduating, she was hired as the head of the childhood services division at the Centre des services sociaux du Montréal Métropolitain.
In the fall of 1978, Marois left her public service job to join her former professor's office at the Department of Finance, but she left her press job after 6 months, feeling Parizeau wasn't "utilizing her to her full potential", she told the former premier's biographer, journalist Pierre Duchesne, a future minister in her own 2012 cabinet.