The Secretary General of La Francophonie has appointed Caroline St-Hilaire from Québec as administrator. This appointment is expected to be confirmed on March 21 .
This appointment was announced by the Canadian press on the night of March 19 and has yet to be confirmed by the Permanent Council of La Francophonie, which will meet in Paris on the morning of March 21. “But there is no doubt,” says one within the management of Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.
At 53, the new administrator succeeds her compatriot Geoffroi Montpetit, who left on March 10 after two years in office. Her contract had not been renewed by Louise Mushikiwabo who, re-elected Secretary General at the end of November at the 18th OIF Summit in Djerba, decided to start her second four-year term with a new team.
It is once again across the Atlantic that the Rwandan went to seek the one who must help her to launch the major projects on which she committed herself at the time of her re-election. Arriving at the head of the OIF in October 2018, the secretary general first worked with Catherine Cano, who resigned in October 2020 to be replaced a few months later by Geoffroi Montpetit.
Significant difference nevertheless, Caroline St-Hilaire was proposed by Quebec, when her two predecessors had been proposed by Ottawa. The Canadian federal state once again submitted its own candidate, before its Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, rallied to the Quebec proposal.
The main thing for him seems to have been able to keep one of the two main positions of the French-speaking executive occupied continuously by a Canadian since 2005 and the appointment of Clément Duhaime as administrator by Abdou Diouf.
François Legault, the Prime Minister of Quebec, was quickly delighted to see his candidate occupy a leading role in the only international organization where Quebec sits as a member state. “This is the opportunity to be able to strengthen the international influence of the province,” he said.
Very active in Québec cultural circles, Caroline St-Hilaire was first a federal deputy, within the Bloc Québécois (BQ) from 1997 to 2008, before becoming mayor of the city of Longueuil, located in the agglomeration of Montreal. , from 2009 to 2017. That year, she announced that she was giving up politics and revealed her deafness in her autobiography, Making Herself Heard.
Five years later, however, she is running for the provincial elections of 2022, this time under the label of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) of François Legault. She is badly beaten in the riding of Sherbrooke. As early as January, her name circulated to take over the general delegation of Quebec in Barcelona, ??before the Quebec Prime Minister proposed her name to become number 2 of the OIF.
