Pierre Paradis - Leadership Candidate

Leadership Candidate

Claude Ryan resigned as Liberal leader after his party's loss in the 1981 provincial election. A leadership convention was scheduled for 1983. Despite having a low public profile, Paradis declared himself a candidate.

Paradis centred his campaign around three principles: "respect for individual rights and freedoms", "the leading role of private enterprise in our economy", and "a firm commitment to federalism." He also called for the Liberal Party to change its image and identify more with the province's regions. He favoured the sale of some crown corporations and was considered the most right-wing of the leadership candidates. This notwithstanding, he also supported Quebec's universal medicare policy; one newspaper article described him as ideologically closer to Brian Mulroney than to Ronald Reagan.

Several reports from the campaign described Paradis as a natural politician with effective organizational skills. One article referred to him as being "from the meat-cleaver school of oratory" with "no shadings of ambiguity."

Robert Bourassa won the 1983 Quebec Liberal Party leadership election with seventy-five per cent of delegate support at the convention. Paradis finished a distant second, narrowly ahead of third-place candidate Daniel Johnson Jr. Despite his loss, Paradis won the respect of other Liberals and improved his public standing through the campaign. In November 1983, Bourassa appointed him as the party's social affairs critic.