He was a Parti Québécois member of the National Assembly of Quebec from 1976 to 1985 and served as a cabinet minister in the governments of René Lévesque and Pierre-Marc Johnson.
[6] He completed an agreement with federal minister Jean-Luc Pepin the same June to modernize commuter transit in the Montreal area.
[7] The following month, however, he criticized the federal government for cancelling some regional train services and said that the closures would not have been necessary if proposed upgrades had been made five years earlier.
[9] In February 1982, Clair introduced legislation stipulating that all persons in the front seat of a moving vehicle be required to wear a seatbelt; taxi drivers, police, and young children had previously been exempted.
[15] Clair strongly criticized the Canadian National Railway's decision in 1983 to shift its administrative offices for trucking and express services from Montreal to Toronto.
When delegates at a party conference voted to tie the PQ to a hardline indépendantiste stand in the next provincial election, Clair quipped that he had "never seen turkeys so eager for Christmas.
"[27] Clair later served as leader of the Quebec Association of Nursing Homes from 1987 to 1994; in September 1989, he described as strike by hospital and health-care workers as "unthinkable" in terms of its effects on elderly residents.
[28] Clair traveled to Romania with a Montreal television crew in late 1989 to record a series of reports on the status of the country's minority Hungarian community.
One of these reports included a clandestine interview with László Tőkés, who was arrested shortly after the broadcast of Dracula's Shadow – The Real Story Behind the Romanian Revolution took place.
Tőkés's arrest helped trigger the Romanian Revolution of 1989, and some have suggested that Clair's interview played a significant role in provoking the latter event.
[32] In September 1997, Clair announced that a new company co-owned by Hydro-Quebec would undertake a partnership with Pan American Enterprises to create a network of compressed natural gas stations in Mexico.
[36] Clair's report was submitted in January 2001, and its recommendations included an increased role for the private sector in health delivery, user fees on items such as meals and laundry for hospital patients, the guaranteed access of all Quebeckers to a family doctor, and the creation of a new publicly funded insurance plan to support treatment for disabled elderly persons.
The report also suggested that some aspects of the Canada Health Act were outdated and led to unequal services; one example provided was that all doctor's visits were covered, while home care was not.