Anglos won’t have much power in next election

Recently, a reader describing himself as an anglophone “former Liberal supporter from Côte-StLuc” emailed to tell me why he won’t be voting Liberal in this year’s Quebec general election.

He was angry at the Liberal government for allowing Montreal, through the agglomeration council which the city controls, to impose property tax increases on the other island municipalities, such as his.

What he didn’t say, however, is how he’d take out his anger on the Liberals. By voting for another party? No party, at least among the four leading ones represented in the National Assembly, is promising to amend the 2004 provincial legislation that created the agglomeration council.

None of those parties wants another power struggle between cities and suburbs that would spread from Montreal Island to the 10 other agglomerations across the province, like the one over municipal mergers and demergers in the early 2000s. Municipal reorganization is to the politics of Quebec what constitutional reform is to the politics of Canada.

And no party with provincewide aspirations wants to be accused in French Quebec of promising a favour to “les Anglais” in Montreal’s western suburbs at the expense of the province’s predominantly French-speaking metropolis.

With the threat of another secession referendum off the table in this year’s election, thanks to the Parti Québécois’s promise not to hold one if it wins, anglo votes appear to be in play.

Some anglos, tired of being electoral captives of the federalist Liberal party, are using the threat to vote for the Coalition Avenir Québec as leverage on the Liberals.

The supposed new anglo political influence is an illusion, however. For the West Island is not an island. It is part of a Quebec where every gain for anglos is seen as a loss for the francophones who essentially elect the government.

The harsh mathematical reality for anglos is in newly published socio-economic data on the 125 provincial ridings on the new electoral map to be used in this year’s election. They show that people who most often speak French at home are the majority of the population in all but 13 ridings. In the latter, speakers of languages other than French or English combine with anglos to form the majority.

In 70 constituencies, enough to elect a majority in the Assembly, more than 90 per cent of the people are francophones by home language. In 88 electoral districts, more than 80 per cent are francos.

Anglos, however, form the dominant home-language group in only six ridings, all in the western half of Montreal Island.

So, anglos will be under-represented (again) in the next legislature. While home-language anglos make up 10.1 per cent of the province’s population, they control only 4.8 per cent of the seats in the Assembly.

And a little-noticed effect of political-financing reforms in recent years has been to weaken anglo influence further, by reducing parties’ dependence on individual donations.

From 2006 to 2016, the proportion of party financing that came from contributions declined from 85.6 per cent to 26.2 per cent, with increasing public subsidies accounting for the rest.

So far in the pre-campaign for this year’s election, the Liberal party, worried about losing anglo votes, is the only one that has offered anglos positive reasons to vote for it.

Notably, Premier Philippe Couillard has appointed a minister responsible for relations between the government and anglos, and created a secretariat to advise the rest of the administration on anglo needs.

Recent polls are not encouraging for the other parties, suggesting that the Liberals still enjoy a comfortable lead in popularity among anglos. So, the Liberals find themselves bidding for anglo votes against themselves. CAQ leader François Legault has offered nothing to anglos in particular, other than the opportunity to vote for his nationalist-but-not-secessionist party.

And the CAQ recently revived its promise to abolish the elected school boards, including the English ones that are an institutional symbol of anglo identity.

That could be a sign that the Coalition, needing to compete with the PQ for nationalist votes in French Quebec, has given up on the anglos.