Brenda O’Farrell
The Advocate

The long-promised provincial cabinet shuffle that political pundits have suggested served merely to rearrange the deck chairs on Premier François Legault’s Titanic-fated CAQ government has produced a new agriculture minister.

Donald Martel, a back-bench MNA since 2012 representing the riding of Nicolet-Bécancour on the south shore of the St. Lawrence across from Trois-Rivières, took over the post Sept. 10, replacing André Lamontagne, who was informed the day before that he would be dropped from the cabinet ranks as part of a shake-up of a government plagued by scandal and plummeting in the polls.

“I will always be the biggest fan of those who feed Quebec,” Lamontagne said in a post on X Sept. 9 after being told he would be shuffled out of the minister’s job.

First elected in 2014 as the MNA for the riding of Johnson in the Centre-de-Québec region, Lamontagne was named to the agriculture portfolio in 2018, when the CAQ first formed government. He has held the post for almost seven years over two mandates.

Earlier this year Lamontagne, 65, said he would not run for re-election in next year’s province-wide vote.

Martel, 61, is a former secretary-treasurer of the MRC of Nicolet-Yamaska and served as an administrator with the local economic development centre. Previous to that he held the post of president of the Association des directeurs généreaux des MRC.

Prior to being elected as a member of the CAQ government, Martel ran unsuccessfully in the 2007 provincial election as a candidate for the Parti Québécois.

The Sept. 10 cabinet shuffle was Legault’s second cabinet reorganization. The first cabinet shake-up came at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.