BOISCLAIR'S SKELETONS RATTLE BITTER PQ RACE

MONTREAL and QUEBEC CITY -- In more serene times, when he was a
precocious cabinet minister rather than Quebec's best-known cocaine
sniffer, Andre Boisclair gave a newspaper interview in which he got
to demonstrate his wits in a game of free association.

If he were a piece of furniture, what kind would he be? A table, he
replied, so he could draw people around him. If he were a city, what
city would he be? Barcelona, he replied, waxing about its beauty.

Then, the paper asked, if he was a drug, what would it be? "If I had
to be addicted to anything, it would be peace," he answered.

Today, in the final moments of a venomous leadership campaign, the
front-running candidate to be the next Parti Quebecois leader must be
yearning for a good dose of peace.

Peace is hard to come by these days in the PQ, where the race to
become the next head of the sovereigntist movement has soared to
unprecedented levels of acrimony.

Clad in the well-tailored suits of the chic designer Philippe Dubuc,
Mr. Boisclair is a toothy 39-year-old with cooler credentials than
previous generations of combed-over PQ politicians.

To a calcifying party, he brings hopes of renewal and fresh blood, a
telegenic figure who assiduously courts minorities and moderates.

But the more old-fashioned Pequistes and some younger restless
tenants of independence are wary of him, seeing him as a
smooth-talking neo-Liberal with a tepid commitment to sovereignty and
a tin ear for their social-democratic ideals.

And because of his admission that he took cocaine as late as 1998,
two years after he had become a cabinet minister, many fear that
their Liberal rivals have found some other skeletons in Mr. Boisclair's closet.

The drug issue has erupted into a full-scale war in the party.

"He poses a risk to achieving sovereignty," said his main leadership
rival, Pauline Marois.

"The members are entitled to know everything at a time when they must
make a decision," said another prominent candidate, Richard Legendre.

Mr. Boisclair remains undeterred. He has nurtured an impressive
network of supporters as part of his long-cherished dream to become
premier. ("I have the ambition to be premier," he had said as early
as January of 2001).

And he is gambling that the nearly 140,000 party members will be
forgiving enough when they choose a new leader in a telephone vote
Sunday to Tuesday.

Mr. Boisclair is popular among young people and his followers boast
that he can inject an influx of fresh supporters into a now-stodgy
PQ. One of the first celebrities to urge him to run was the
Haitian-born singer Luck Mervil, giving Mr. Boisclair an extra sheen
of hipness.

But political insiders see Mr. Boisclair as a haughty upstart with a
slim record of achievements. Journalists in Quebec City noted
occasions when, as he left an event, he would lift his arms,
expecting an aide to help him don his coat.

He acknowledges that he was immodest in his first years in politics,
but insists he has learned the virtues of humility, partly with the
help of a psychoanalyst.

Mr. Boisclair grew up in Outremont, the leafy, affluent enclave that
is home to Montreal's francophone elite. His father, Marc-Andre, was
a real-estate developer who, Mr. Boisclair likes to tell reporters,
had his career ups and downs.

Mr. Boisclair attended the exclusive College Jean-de-Brebeuf, whose
alumni include Pierre Trudeau. There, the young man known as "Dede"
befriended future decision-makers on both sides of Quebec's political
divide. His circle of friends included federalists such as Marc-Andre
Blanchard, a future president of the provincial Liberal Party, and
Paul Lalonde, son of the Trudeau-era federal minister Marc Lalonde.

"I had no clear indication at the time that he was a sovereigntist
and it even surprised me when he entered politics for the PQ," Paul
Lalonde recalled.

In fact, belying the cliche of the rebellious, pro-independence
Quebec teenagers, Mr. Boisclair was 14 and a federalist during the
1980 referendum.

He later said he would have voted No in 1980 had he been old enough
to cast a ballot.

Mr. Boisclair, now the pretty boy of Quebec politics, hadn't grown
yet into his looks when they were classmates, Mr. Lalonde said. "It's
only now that the sex appeal has become part of his public persona."

Mr. Boisclair said he experienced his sovereigntist epiphany while
travelling in eastern Quebec. He was 19 and after listening to a
speech by Bernard Landry, he joined the PQ and went to work for Mr.
Landry's unsuccessful 1985 leadership bid.

Four years later, having dropped out of pursuing a bachelor's degree
in economics, he became the youngest sitting member in the Quebec
National Assembly and his moderate views on sovereignty quickly
became a handicap in the midst of a surge in nationalism that
followed the failed 1990 Meech Lake constitutional accord.

In 1993, Mr. Boisclair criticized the PQ as being "fundamentalist"
for failing to attract support among ethnic communities and for
promoting outright political independence for Quebec.

For someone with a reputation for political flair, Mr. Boisclair had
rubbed his leader, Jacques Parizeau, the wrong way. As far as he was
concerned, Mr. Parizeau snapped back, "that young Boisclair no longer exists."

The promising backbencher was left in the political doghouse and a
cabinet job opened for him only with the arrival of Lucien Bouchard
as leader in 1996.

Mr. Boisclair became the most ardent defender of Mr. Bouchard's
conservative fiscal policies and shared his vision of a new political
deal between Quebec and the rest of Canada.

"If I could be Canadian like the French are European, tomorrow I
would sign [such a deal]" he said at the time.

As minister of social solidarity in 1998, Mr. Boisclair tackled the
issue of government spending cuts with the ruthlessness of an entrepreneur.

One controversial instance occurred with the demutualization of the
Canadian insurance industry, the process where life insurers
converted from mutual enterprises owned by their policy holders to
publicly traded companies owned by shareholders.

Welfare recipients who were policy owners became eligible to receive
shares worth thousands of dollars.

Mr. Boisclair's department was criticized for making no efforts to
explain to welfare recipients that their new assets had to be
declared and that they would lose their benefits and have their money
seized by the government.

In one high-profile case, a single mother of two who got off welfare
and opened a hair salon was left on the brink of bankruptcy after the
government insisted she reimburse back taxes. That move and other
cost-cutting initiatives angered anti-poverty groups that were
lobbying the government for concrete steps to help the poor.

"[Mr. Boisclair] wasn't very receptive to our concerns," social
activist Vivian Labrie recalled.

When Mr. Landry became leader, Mr. Boisclair rose quickly through the
ranks, holding simultaneously the environment and municipal affairs
portfolios while being House leader.

Only months into his first cabinet job, opposition members were
criticizing Mr. Boisclair's hefty expense account. Few knew at the
time he had taken cocaine and that his chief of staff, Luc Doray, had
become a cocaine addict.

Mr. Doray has since pleaded guilty to embezzling $30,000 from the
government to feed his habit. Mr. Doray, who was caught by a routine
audit, admitted to claiming false travel and lodging expenses and
falsifying restaurant bills.

On some of those restaurant outings, it was Mr. Boisclair who
authorized Mr. Doray to pick up the tab, the court heard.

However, it was Mr. Doray who forged the receipts to inflate his
expense claims.

So far in the leadership campaign, his sexual orientation has never
openly been an issue. But Mr. Boisclair remains plagued by rumours
about having an unruly lifestyle.

He is no longer reluctant to say that he is gay. However, to the
alternative weekly Voir, which asked why he didn't embrace a more
militant style, he famously replied that, "I draw no pride from my
sexual orientation."

Nor does he draw pride from his cocaine use, acknowledging only
minimal details and painting himself as a victim of media harassment.

He was stumped when a TV anchor asked him what message his drug use
would send to parents trying to raise children. "What do you want me
to say?" he answered.

One experienced law-enforcement official noted in an interview that,
at the retail level, cocaine users like Mr. Boisclair are unlikely to
have had any direct contact with someone linked to organized crime.

However, Mr. Boisclair's attempts at playing down what happened and
the period during which he concedes he used cocaine raised eyebrows.

"It's rather disturbing," the law-enforcement official said. "Nobody
in our office thinks that cocaine consumption is banal."

Mr. Boisclair admits to having used cocaine up to 1997 or 1998, at a
time when biker gangs in Quebec were in the midst of a brutal turf
war for control of Montreal's multimillion-dollar illicit drug trade.
An 11-year-old boy died in a car-bomb blast. Two prison guards were
assassinated.

During that period, police and prosecutors were clamouring after
politicians to give them better tools to curb the violence. In turn,
the PQ cabinet, of which Mr. Boisclair was a member, was calling on
Ottawa to adopt anti-gang laws.

All of this makes calls by many party members for greater
transparency even more urgent. As the campaign enters a final
decisive week, Mr. Boisclair faces a difficult choice that could make
or break his leadership bid.

Former union leader Marc Laviolette, who directs a left-wing faction
of labour and social activists in the PQ, says the mystery
surrounding Mr. Boisclair's cocaine use jeopardizes the future of the
party and Quebec sover eignty should he become leader.

"Where there's smoke, there's fire," Mr. Laviolette said in an interview.

"The Liberals are going to use it in an election campaign. That's why
they are so quiet about it now. If I were a Liberal, I know I'd use
it. They will use this issue and unleash everything they have to win
an election and stop the holding of another referendum on sovereignty."