Québec Fier looks to tap into voter discontent
Similar to Ontario Proud, group is likely to resonate
Éric Duhaime, the Quebec City radio host and noted flesh-and-blood troll, is hardly an appealing messenger. He minimized a probable hate crime against the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City — a pig ’s head was placed on its doorstep — about seven months before the mass shooting in 2017. He has long fomented ire toward Muslims, including by portraying halal food as an imposition of minority religious beliefs and traditions on the Quebec majority.
When Duhaime and two cohorts, politicos Maxime Hupé and Jean-Philippe Fournier, recently launched Québec Fier (Quebec Proud), they claimed the group was a wholly non-partisan effort to oust Philippe Couillard’s Liberals in the provincial election in October.
Even a cursory look at the group’s website sets that noble-sounding notion aflame. Québec Fier’s bromides to “language, culture (and) traditions,” along with its anti-separatist bent, might have been stolen from Coalition Avenir Québec’s electoral playbook. It seems quite clear that this website exists to ensure CAQ Leader François Legault leads the next Quebec government, point final.
Evidence of that lies in the site’s apparent brand toxicity. Already, Hupé left his job as a consultant for Senator Larry Smith after his involvement in the project came to light. Duhaime, who presents himself as a free-speech absolutist, nonetheless backed away from Québec Fier at the first hint of controversy.
But to dismiss Québec Fier along with its objectives and methods — harvesting support by harnessing social media, essentially — is to miss why such a site is appealing in Quebec in the first place. It strikes a nerve precisely because it reflects the collective resentment toward the province’s political class.
“Corruption and collusion reign in the government of Quebec.” Though tinged with hyperbole, this pithy sentence from Québec Fier’s mission statement nonetheless speaks to the political reality that the governing Quebec Liberal Party hasn’t learned its lesson from its scandal-plagued recent past. It hasn’t had to, because it has scantly been punished.
It was all of seven years ago that Liberal Premier Jean Charest, under duress, launched the so-called Charbonneau Commission into the province’s construction industry. It took the commission less than a year to hear testimony that Charest’s Liberals became adept at extracting dollars from the province’s construction and engineering firms by way of “straw man donations.”
In order to get around Quebec’s electoral laws banning corporate donations, these firms would compel their employees to donate to the Liberal Party, with a promise to reimburse them. The practice is illegal under Quebec electoral law.
Despite the revelation, the Liberals spent all of 18 months in purgatory following the 2012 election. In 2014, under Couillard, the Liberals stormed back — even though Couillard himself was part of Charest’s cabinet when the fundraising hustle was at its height. In fact, with 11 Charest-era cabinet members serving in Couillard’s inner circle, one would be forgiven in thinking that Couillard’s tenure has been little but a Charest retread.
And the alternative has been almost as corrupt. The Parti Québécois has often decried Liberal corruption. Yet it, too, was involved in “straw man” fundraising to circumvent the very law the party put in place in 1977.
The equal-opportunity nature of the corruption was laid bare in a 2013 report by the Association professionnelle des ingénieurs du gouvernement du Québec showing how the province’s 10 largest engineering firms dumped $13.5 million into the coffers of its major political parties between 1998 and 2010 — 36 per cent of which went to the party of Saint René Lévesque.
Quebec Fier might well be a partisan repository of click bait and chest thumping. It is most definitely unoriginal, in that it is a near carbon copy of Ontario Proud, an equally partisan outfit widely credited with aiding Rob Ford’s ascendancy.
But in selling Quebecers their own disenchantment with the political status quo, Québec Fier has tapped into a fertile market. Business is going to be good.