Apathy caused non-francophone vote to plummet
Few reasons to vote for Liberals or others with sovereignty off table
With the exception of the anglophone-rights Equality Party in 1989, Jacob Hughes has always put an X next to the Liberal candidate on provincial ballots. Not this time.
In last week’s election, there was no X at all because he stayed home.
“The (Coalition Avenir Québec) was getting in and the Liberal was going to win here, so why should I bother?” said Hughes, 64.
He was speaking as he put groceries into his trunk in the parking lot of the Côte-St-Luc shopping centre, which straddles the D’Arcy-McGee and Notre-Dame-de-Grace ridings, two of 13 where less than half the population speaks French at home.
The Liberals turned their backs on anglophones and didn’t deserve his vote anyway, Hughes said, citing the party’s decision to “tell people they can’t say ‘Hi’ in a store.”
Hughes is one of the reasons voter turnout plummeted among non-francophones on Oct. 1.
WHAT HAPPENED?
The Montreal Gazette analyzed turnout in the last six elections, focusing on 13 ridings where fewer than half of voters speak French at home. Eleven are in Montreal, one is in Laval and one in Northern Quebec.
Some of the Gazette’s findings:
■ The average turnout in these ridings on Oct. 1 was 53 per cent, 13 percentage points lower than the provincial average of 66 per cent.
■ Two of the non-francophone ridings saw participation drop by more than 20 per cent compared to 2014. The ridings were D’Arcy-McGee (Côte- St-Luc, Hampstead and Snowdon) and Robert-Baldwin (Dollard-des-Ormeaux and part of Pierrefonds-Roxboro).
■ Compared to the 2014 election, the turnout in the 13 non-francophone ridings fell by an average 17 per cent. The drop was only five per cent when you look at all 125 ridings.
With few exceptions, nonfrancophones have traditionally backed the Quebec Liberal Party, often seen as the only alternative to nationalist parties focused on promoting the French language and/or Quebec independence.
And despite the fact that almost 100,000 fewer people voted in these ridings compared to 2014, those who did cast ballots continued to be Liberal red.
The Liberals held on to 12 of the 13 non-francophones seats, winning with smaller majorities than usual but comfortably (average margin of victory: 13,000). The only exception: the northern riding of Ungava, where the CAQ replaced the Liberals.
Across Quebec, Philippe Couillard’s Liberals garnered 25 per cent of the votes and 32 seats, down from the last election’s tally of 42 per cent and 70 seats.
There are 125 seats in the National Assembly.
WHY DID SO MANY NON-FRANCOPHONES STAY HOME?
For one thing, sovereignty wasn’t on the agenda, with the CAQ’s François Legault promising never to hold a referendum.
In addition, the CAQ’s positions on immigration, protecting the French language and banning religious symbols for some government workers may not have resonated with non-francophones.
Many anglophones and other non-francophones did not feel they could have an impact on Quebec politics, said Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies.
“There was a sense of disempowerment and disengagement,” he said.
The Liberals also suffered because many voters had seen enough of the party, which has been in power for much of the last 15 years, said Geoffrey Chambers, president of the Quebec Community Groups Network.
And the alternatives were not particularly appealing.
“People weren’t enthusiastic about their choices in this election,” said Chambers, whose network represents more than 50 anglophone groups.
“There wasn’t a big policy theme they could vote for and there wasn’t a political movement that they felt excited about.”
And in non-francophone ridings, “you know who’s probably going to be in the National Assembly representing you — do you take the afternoon off to make a gesture when you just don’t feel it?”
HOW MUCH OF IT WAS ABOUT DISCONTENT WITH THE LIBERALS?
The disparity between the nonfrancophone turnout and overall turnout was about the same in the 2008 election, when Charest’s minority Liberal government called an election and won a majority.
Voter fatigue (two elections in two years) led to the lowest turnout in 70 years that year.
But other factors were also at play.
Chambers said Charest had been “quite neglectful” of anglophones. His organization couldn’t get a meeting with the premier and anglophones in the cabinet were not considered influential.
“Charest walled himself a fair bit,” perhaps fearing close ties to non-francophones would make a majority difficult, he added.
In contrast, Couillard’s government “did a fair amount for the English-speaking community,” Chambers said. It created a secretariat for anglophone affairs and appointed a minister to oversee it.
But some of the goodwill dissipated, Jedwab said.
Many non-francophones were turned off by the Liberals’ decision to back a Parti Québécois motion against the use of “Bonjour-Hi” by store workers, and to enact Bill 62, which bars people with face-coverings from giving or receiving public services, including bus rides.
Such symbolic and material gestures might cause some voters “to feel as though that party just doesn’t understand the (anglophone) community,” Chambers said.
After their humiliating defeat, some Liberals now want to pivot to a more nationalistic stance to win back the francophones who abandoned the party.
That has happened before, under former Liberal leaders Robert Bourassa and Claude Ryan.
Anglophones would be offended if history repeats itself and “we begin to be excluded and told we have to shut up — yes, we’re half their vote but we don’t get a say on policy questions because we’re an embarrassment to them, which was basically Claude Ryan’s line.”
WHAT’SNEXT?
There is some historic precedence to low non-francophone participation in elections.
Under the Duplessis regime (the 1930s through the 1950s), “anglophones in particular felt they had very little impact on the outcome of elections,” Jedwab said. “The power was very focused on ridings and parts of the province outside of Montreal.”
Voter turnout ebbs and flows among non-francophones but, “when the stakes are perceived to be high and there’s a feeling that everyone has an impact and all votes count in a very similar way, people turn out,” he added.
An example: the 1995 referendum, when non-francophone ridings recorded some of the highest participation rates.
The non-francophone vote could become more meaningful if a form of proportional representation is introduced, as the CAQ has promised. That could give non-francophones, whose votes are concentrated in a few ridings, a bigger voice.
Under the current system, only three or four members of the National Assembly “would stand up and say convincingly, ‘I represent theEnglish-speakingcommunity,’” Chambers said.
That’s less than one per cent of the legislature’s 125 MNAs, even though 13 per cent of Quebecers speak English at home.
“The real weight of the Englishspeaking community is more like 13 to 18 seats,” Chambers said.
IS IT THE BEGINNING OF A TREND?
Chambers is not overly concerned yet. “If it were a trend, if it happened over two elections, I would be very, very worried,” he said. “I’m going to attribute this to fairly specific conditions that apply in this election.”
Jedwab, for his part, said it’s time for soul-searching.
“It’s our civic duty to go out and vote, independent of what we think the outcome may be or whether or not we think our vote will have an impact,” he said.
“So when you have a riding like D’Arcy-McGee where there’s a 47 per cent turnout, you’ve got to ask yourself some serious questions. It shows a certain disengagement.”
Ideally, Jedwab added, “we want people to be engaged because when they’re not engaged in this process then that means they feel very distant from the political system in the society that they’re part of.”