Hot News: In CAQ leader François Legault, Quebec voters were never really sure what they ...

Down to the wire, people still wondered: Who is François Legault, really, and what are his politics, and when will they change, again?

Hard to pin down is Mr. Legault. Founder and leader of Quebec's third party, the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), he represented to voters an unclarified compromise. A certain risk, mitigated by soft assurances, fiscal prudence, and cultural pride.

The CAQ was built to resemble its flexible leader, espousing neither separatism nor federalism, neither the right nor left, but a third path between traditional choices. Like Mr. Legault, the CAQ billed itself as the party of entrepreneurialism and renewal.

At the 'core' of his election platform was a grand economic plan, called 'The St. Lawrence Project.' Introduced almost a year ago, it was meant to 'promote the emergence of an innovation culture in Quebec, and generates important synergies between businesses, research centres and living environments,' and to create '100,000 jobs in 20 Innovation zones' in the St. Lawrence corridor.

This received little attention in a campaign whose two main contenders battled over more divisive and familiar fare, sovereignty and the Secular Charter. But a strong showing in the second debate of the campaign, and perhaps weariness with the obsessions and weaknesses of the leading two parties, saw a CAQ rise in the polls that appeared to be peaking in the campaign's final weekend.

Mr. Legault tried playing to his strengths. He is at heart a businessman, after all. Raised in suburban Montreal and schooled at the École des Hautes Études commerciales de Montréal, he was a prodigy, serving as youthful administrator and accountant to major companies and firms while in his early 20s. First with Ernst and Young, then the upstart airlines Nationair and Quebecair.

In 1986, he co-founded Air Transat, another Quebec-based charter airline and tour operator. He was not yet 30 years old.

Air Transat became a success, hitting $550-million in annual sales within its first 10 years. Mr. Legault, its chief executive, was the airline's most public face, dealing with media and investors. But in 1997, he suddenly changed course.

Without making his reasons public, Mr. Legault resigned from Air Transat. ''When I first heard on Monday it was like a brick in the face,' airline analyst said Jacques Kavafian told the Financial Post at the time. ''[Legault] was very much a part of everything they have done ... He was an entrepreneur, a very astute businessperson who was the company's chief contact with the investment community.'

In 1998, he formally launched his political career, without even running for office. The Parti Québécois' then-leader, Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard, appointed Mr. Legault as the province's new industry minister. At the time of his appointment, Mr. Legault did not sit in Quebec's National Assembly.

Three months later he did run, in a provincial election, and captured the riding of Rousseau, which he would represent for another 10 years as a PQ member. Mr. Legault served as provincial education minister and then as health minister. He held a number of other minor cabinet portfolios until Quebec's Liberal party returned to power in 2003.

Mr. Legault's politics were unambiguous, in those days. In 2005, while sitting in the opposition benches, he crafted an economic argument, based on his own research, that Quebec could not only survive as an independent country, it would be better off without Canada.

Four years later, and just one year into yet another term as MNA, Mr. Legault abruptly resigned. He announced his return to politics in early 2011, as co-founder of a new 'movement,' the Coalition pour l'avenir du Québec. Later that year, a new party was formed, the CAQ, and Mr. Legault became its leader.

He was reborn. Or rather, he was revealed. 'Sincerely, my priority in entering politics was never independence,' he told the Post's Graeme Hamilton, in December 2011. 'It was always leaving behind a better Quebec, a wealthier Quebec, a Quebec that does a better job looking after the underprivileged. For me independence was a means to attain an objective.'

The CAQ became another vehicle to chase his transformational - and transmutable - desires. National Post * Email: bhutchinson@nationalpost.com | Twitter: hutchwriter

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