Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault waves from his campaign bus in Quebec City in 2012. He announced his resignation as the province's premier on Wednesday.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press

For several minutes on Wednesday, a visibly deflated François Legault sought to put the best face on his hero-to-zero run as Quebec’s 32nd premier, highlighting his efforts to save “the maximum number of lives” during the COVID-19 pandemic and touting his province’s superior economic performance to that of neighbouring Ontario.

Ultimately, however, Mr. Legault failed in his mission to shift the paradigm of Quebec politics from the existential brooding over the province’s place in (or out of) Canada that had sustained a Liberal-Parti Québécois duopoly to a more conventional right-left continuum based on economics.

With his 2011 creation of the Coalition Avenir Québec, Mr. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, established an alliance of bleus and rouges and vowed to put the independence question on hold to focus on the massive economic challenges facing the province as its infrastructure creaked and its population aged.

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In the end, he did not bridge the........

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