MONTREAL—If you had to know only one thing about the fluid state of Quebec politics as the province’s federalist government prepares to present a mid-mandate budget later this week, it would be that premier Philippe Couillard is having as brutal a season as the Montreal Canadiens.

Over the past two months, Quebec’s Liberal government has been most consistent at scoring on itself.

From the controversial trade-offs involved in securing an order for Bombardier’s C-series airliners from Air Canada to the public reluctance of the female minister in charge of the status of women to call herself a feminist, there has not been a week that has not ended with the Quebec Liberals having to lick new, self-inflicted wounds.

Couillard’s justice minister, Stéphanie Vallée, has just spent 10 days tangled up in a debate over whether Quebec couples who marry in church are married in the eyes of the law.

By systematically demeaning his female opposition critic in the national assembly, health minister Gaétan Barette has turned himself into a poster boy for parliamentary bullying. An unapologetic appearance on Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parle on Sunday only compounded the damage.

Couillard himself spent the better part of the winter preaching against the possible exploitation of shale gas on Anticosti Island, only to concede late last week that his government would continue to fulfill a contract that commits it to underwrite an exploratory drilling operation.

Meanwhile, a cabinet shuffle that was meant to reenergize the government has, instead, undermined caucus morale. Candidates poached from the ranks of the right-leaning Coalition Avenir Québec party now hold the top social and economic portfolios in the Liberal government.

Imagine the reaction if the prime minister convinced Conservative MPs Tory Clement, Kelly Leitch and Lisa Raitt to cross the floor and installed them in the frontline portfolios in his cabinet!

For the first half of his mandate, Couillard enjoyed two passing blessings. The first was the presence on Parliament Hill of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

With Harper’s Quebec talent pool so shallow and his policies so unpopular in Quebec, Couillard could only benefit from the comparisons. But the optics changed for the worse with Justin Trudeau’s election victory.

In a province that tends to crave aspirational progressive governments, Couillard’s bean-counting Liberals — when stacked up against the new Ottawa team — come across as unambitious and a lot less progressive than their party label suggests.

Two years in, there is no denying that the dominant instincts of the current Quebec government and of its premier are conservative.

The other fading Liberal asset has been the constant diversions offered until recently by the travails of the Parti Québécois under rookie leader Pierre Karl Péladeau.

Over the past couple of months, PKP — as the leader of Quebec’s main sovereigntist party is familiarly known — has stepped back from the brink of a party crisis and started to settle into his role of chief critic of the government.

The PQ is not the only party enjoying a decent season at the expense of an inconsistent government. The CAQ’s François Legault is also making the best of the Liberals tangled-up talking points, in particular on economic files.

Couillard’s Liberals are hoping Thursday’s mid-mandate budget will allow them to turn the page on a lost political winter. It should feature a course correction.

When they came to power two years ago, the game plan was to balance the books over the first half of the mandate and then bring down taxes in the two years leading up to the election.

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But pre-budget leaks suggest that, if only to stave off an increasingly vocal backlash against the Liberal austerity measures, cutting taxes will take a backseat to re-investing in education.

With two years to go to the provincial election, there is still time for Couillard to right his ship. Meanwhile, though, the haphazard course of the Quebec government could have consequences for its federal partners.

As the Trudeau government considers whether to join Quebec in underwriting Bombardier’s C-series, it should, for instance, note that Couillard’s handling of the file has done more to discredit the notion of bailing out Canada’s leading aerospace company than to foster popular support for throwing more money at it.

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