MONTREAL—Former Parti Québécois leader André Boisclair disclosed that he had used cocaine during the years he served as a Quebec cabinet minister while he was campaigning for the leadership in 2005.

He called it an error of youth, said that his drug use had been strictly recreational and added that he had given it up for good.

By then the leadership campaign had become Boisclair’s to lose. On the heels of his confession, more than a few pundits wondered whether he would even make it to the finish line.

In the end he won a decisive leadership victory.

It seemed that his disclosure had had no negative impact on his popularity. If anything polls suggested that Quebecers mostly appreciated Boisclair’s frankness. Some said it was refreshing.

For a while Boisclair became a poster boy for the win-win political virtues of proactive disclosure.

Two years later though he led the PQ to a disastrous third-place finish. Within months of that defeat his political career came to an end.

His rivals never raised his cocaine use directly on the campaign trail. But former premier Jean Charest repeatedly questioned whether the PQ leader was mature enough to be premier.

Charest was not alluding to Boisclair’s age. It certainly was not the reason why so many past supporters of the PQ deserted him. Most of them switched to the ADQ, an untested party led by a man four years younger than the 41-year-old Boisclair.

Long after the refreshing impact of Boisclair’s admission that he had used cocaine had subsided, doubts as to what the episode revealed about his character lingered.

At the end of last week, he left his posting as Quebec’s envoy to New York to fend off allegations of past ministerial improprieties related to his cocaine use.

Jacques Duchesneau, the Coalition Avenir Québec’s public security critic, has speculated that Boisclair expedited a government contract for work done by a business that was subsequently taken over by the Hells Angels, because the bikers were his cocaine suppliers.

Duchesneau has offered no factual proof to support the tangled web that he has tentatively woven but when faced with the threat of legal action, he refused to back down. Now Boisclair is suing him (as well as CAQ Leader François Legault).

A Quebec election will almost certainly take place before any legal proceeding comes to a conclusion and the CAQ is gambling that on the campaign trail the credibility of a former police chief such as Duchesneau will outweigh that of a past cocaine user, to the detriment of the PQ.

Meanwhile, the party is keeping its fingers crossed for more evidence of Boisclair’s life on the Montreal party scene to come to light, if only to reinforce its suggestion that the former PQ leader’s drug use brought him in contact with some unsavory characters.

Marijuana is not cocaine. There is widespread public sympathy for liberalizing access to the former and no plan to ever put the latter on corner store shelves in Canada.

But there are similarities between Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s recent admission that he smoked marijuana after he became an MP and Boisclair’s cocaine-related confession.

Whether it is marijuana or cocaine, no party leader wants to wake up to a headline that ties him or her to using illegal drugs in the middle of an election campaign.

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In an age when the social media is ubiquitous, there is no way to know what pictures may be out there or whether or how they will surface. The controversy surrounding Toronto’s current mayor is a case in point.

On that basis the primary motivation for coming clean about drug-use episodes proactively was one and the same in both Trudeau and Boisclair’s cases.

If Boisclair’s experience is any indication, candour is hardly the first virtue that voters look for in a leader. And even as they assure pollsters that they do not hold it against a politician that he or she consumed illegal drugs while holding elected office, not many voters would describe that act as a sign of good judgment.

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