NEW OPINION COLUMNIST
Patriquin weighs in on CAQ
This is a new column by veteran Montreal journalist Martin Patriquin, whose work will appear in print Thursdays.
On the face of it, the Coalition Avenir Québec is hardly revolutionary. The party’s platform, a hodgepodge of nationalist chest thumping and government intervention, is in line with nearly every Liberal and Péquiste effort over the last half-century.
At its heart, the CAQ is a Baby Boomer party, chock full of Baby Boomer fears and insecurities. Judging by the rhetoric of leader François Legault, you’d think immigrants aren’t a crucial source of demographic renewal in the province, but a scourge to be contained, constrained and converted. It’s odious stuff — though it’s nothing we haven’t heard from Action démocratique du Québec, the CAQ’s ideological forefather, nor from the more recent nativist incarnation of the Parti Québécois.
Yet by forgoing the issue of Quebec separation, the CAQ presents an alluring spectre not seen in Quebec since the days of bouffants and free love: a properly functioning political marketplace.
Come election time, Quebec’s two major political parties are de facto single issue. It has been the job of one (the PQ) to sell Quebecers on the merits of separation, while the Liberals exist to scare people away from it. This little dance, performed for nearly as long as Céline Dion has been alive, has had an atrophying effect on Quebec’s political class.
The Liberals and the PQ are each other’s respective bogeyman. Each is equally guilty. The PQ is chronically obstinate in the face of
It is less protest party than a signal of our collective exhaustion.
the federal government, if only to demonstrate the extent to which Quebec suffers under Canada’s thumb.
The Liberals, as perpetual saviours of Canada, are beset by a bulletproof sense of entitlement that has afforded all manner of overindulgences. It is over 150 years old, but its true legacy lies in the pages of the Charbonneau commission report published in 2015. The Liberal Party of Quebec didn’t invent political corruption. It just turned it into an art form.
The arrival (and more importantly, the recent success) of the CAQ is a potential salve to this unfortunate zero-sum game. Made up of sovereignists who are sick of sovereignty’s pursuit and federalists sick of the Liberal Party, it is less protest party than a signal of our collective exhaustion. Legault, a former Péquiste himself, is a personification of this exhaustion — a former true believer who just wants to get on with life.
Stunned by Legault’s incursion and worried by his success, the PQ and the Liberals have reverted to old talking points. The CAQ’s version of nationalism is “stupefying, absurd and harmful,” said PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée in March, as though deviating from PQ scripture is tantamount to apostasy.
The Liberals, meanwhile, have spent the last seven years trying to convince the populace that the CAQ is a band of crypto-sovereignists. That sound you hear is Legault rubbing his hands together maniacally, possibly from behind a grassy knoll.
For both parties, demonizing the CAQ has been an exercise in the law of diminishing returns. It worked somewhat in the 2012 election and worked less in 2014. Today, few beyond blinkered partisans still believe the rhetoric.
Speaking of blinkered partisans, perhaps the hardest bond to break is that between the Liberals and the province’s anglophones. Though not quite abusive, it is an unhealthy relationship; voting for the Liberals despite their repeated transgressions is the equivalent of giving vodka to a drunk. It has conditioned Philippe Couillard’s party to believe there are no consequences. And it has turned us into saps zombie-walking into the polling booth.
The CAQ isn’t necessarily the answer to this. The party is status quo in most of its policies, and downright wretched in others. Yet in untethering itself from a certain nagging existential question, the CAQ gives voters a chance to judge it solely on its merits — absent old ghosts. May there be more parties like it, on the right and left.