In this campaign, one fear has replaced another
Sovereignty used to be the bogeyman, now it seems to be immigration
In 1970, a year marked by burgeoning facial hair and a certain unhinged president in the White House, Quebec held an election in which getting the hell out of Canada was on the table, even if a remote possibility. In 2018, with facial hair once again a resounding thing and an even more unhinged president serving as commander-in-chief, the province will, for the first time in 48 years, vote in an election in which staying put is a given.
This is very good news. For nearly half a century, Quebec politics has been a zero-sum game between those who wish to stay in Canada and those who wish to leave. The left-right divide, the traditional hash mark for nearly every political system on the planet, has been less important. The political culture has atrophied as a result. Having governed for all but 18 months of the last 15 years, the Quebec Liberal Party is as bloated with self-entitlement as one might expect — despite the vexing truth that the party’s success is due less to ideals and management than to flogging the separatist bogeyman every election cycle.
For its part, the Parti Québécois is a victim of demographics and its own inability to proselytize to younger generations — and has since become a refuge for baby boomer nativism as support for its raison d’être has subsided over the last several decades.
The so-called charter of Quebec values, introduced by the PQ in 2013, was born of the idea that religious minorities, particularly non-Christian ones, shouldn’t be seen. Had the charter become law, Quebec would have been one of the very few jurisdictions in the world where a public sector employee could lose his job for wearing a kippah to work.
Credit where credit is due: by creating a viable, mostly centrist party whose nationalist-not-separatist stance reflects the (delightfully ambiguous) thinking of many Quebecers, Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault presents the province with a viable third option, even if, unfortunately it would, like the PQ’s failed charter of yore, prohibit the wearing of religious symbols by judges, prison guards, police officers — and, notably, teachers, effectively barring certain practising members of religious minorities from these positions.
Already, the CAQ’s mere presence has laid waste to familiar clichés. Parti Québécois Leader Jean-François Lisée, realizing that sovereignty is only slightly more popular than herpes and bad breath combined, officially put the project on the back burner for the first term of a Parti Québécois government. The fearmongering rhetoric surrounding a referendum, once a staple of every Quebec election, is practically non-existent today.
The Liberals have also been forced to change tack. In 2014, Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard regularly portrayed Legault, himself a former Péquiste, as a crypto-sovereignist who exists only to finish what the PQ started. In 2018, Couillard has mostly attacked Legault for being a terrible would-be premier of the province. This, my friends, is progress.
Yet while Legault has divorced himself of sovereignty, he has nonetheless adopted the fear-mongering aspect all-too-present in the movement’s modern incarnation. Legault said he would reduce the number of immigrants by 20 per cent — which, in an aging population such as Quebec’s, constitutes an act of demographic suicide.
Worse still, he has tied immigration to the supposed decline of French. Again, this is absurd. A 2016 Office québécois de la langue française report, the use of French in the workplace actually increased among anglophones and allophones between 1997 and 2016. In 1989, the PQ’s platform noted how “70 per cent of allophones adopt English as their second language.” In 2012, that number had decreased 30 per cent, according to the OQLF’s most recent statistics.
Legault continues to appeal to Quebec’s collective and wholly understandable fear of the decline of French, then pins this supposed decline on immigrants to Quebec. Why? Because it’s easy, and it works. In ridding this campaign of one clichéd fear — of sovereignty — Legault has essentially replaced it with another. twitter.com/martinpatriquin