MONTREAL - Many people had low expectations for Andre Boisclair in the Quebec election. On Monday night, he met them.
Boisclair, the Parti Quebecois' youngest leader and a member of the legislature at the age of 23, now has the dubious distinction of leading the PQ to one of its most stunning defeats.
The election, in which the PQ gained fewer than 40 of the province's 125 seats, effectively stopped the clock on any timing for another sovereignty referendum.
But it likely started it ticking away on how long Boisclair will keep the PQ's top job.
The 40-year-old Boisclair was actually credited with having a fairly smooth campaign, overcoming the criticism that dogged him before the election of being a thin-skinned political lightweight with cocaine abuse in his past.
He performed well in the March 13 leaders' debate, going after his opponents like a prosecutor with a solid command of his files.
Boisclair was credited with showing more maturity than the emotional Action democratique du Quebec Leader Mario Dumont and more life than the paternalistic Liberal Leader Jean Charest.
He managed to mainly avoid the gaffes that had plagued the first year of his leadership, although he raised eyebrows when he angrily refused to apologize for referring to Asians as having "slanting eyes.''
Boisclair took over the PQ in November 2005 from former leader Bernard Landry, who quit when he got a disappointing approval rating at a party convention.
Boisclair, who had quit the legislature in 2004 to attend the prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, changed plans to work in Toronto afterward to seek the PQ leadership.
He was pegged to bring new faces and new ideas into the PQ but he was never able to live up to a boast to assemble a "dream team'' for the provincial election to rival Rene Levesque's impressive lineup when the PQ first took power in 1976.
Once in the leadership, Boisclair dragged his feet in getting elected to the legislature, saying he was rebuilding the party. Then he committed the unpardonable sin of soft-pedalling sovereignty in an impatient party.
Then came the gaffes.
The openly gay Boisclair had to admit he made a mistake when he participated in a silly parody of the gay cowboy movie "Brokeback Mountain'' with actors portraying Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President George W. Bush.
He was slow off the mark in the hot-button Quebec debate over the reasonable accommodation of immigrants, suggesting that maybe it was time to take the Roman Catholic crucifix out of the provincial legislature.
Party members likely saw his worst moment as presiding over a slide from dominance in the polls over Charest's Liberals.
The son of a real-estate developer in upscale Outremont, Boisclair was elected to the legislature at the age of 23 in 1989,
He ran afoul of then-leader Jacques Parizeau for saying the PQ under Parizeau was "too fundamentalist.''
When Lucien Bouchard took over from Parizeau after the sovereigntist loss in the 1995 referendum, he led Boisclair from the political doghouse and appointed him minister of social solidarity.
Boisclair's responsibilities increased under Landry, who had the earnest politician juggling the environment and municipal affairs portfolios while serving as government House Leader.
But once in the top job, few people warmed up to Boisclair the way they had Levesque or Bouchard. In the end, they left him as they found him -- cold.
