IN QUEBEC, A NEW GENERATION OF POLITICS
• As Quebec enters the 2018 election year, the biggest story could be not who wins, but who loses.
The Parti Québécois is in deep trouble heading toward the Oct. 1 vote, shunned by younger voters and a distant third in opinion polls. The Coalition Avenir Québec, formed with a mission to focus on the economy instead of the Constitution, is the runaway choice of francophone voters. Fifty years after the PQ’s creation, analysts are saying this could be the year the federalist-separatist stranglehold on Quebec politics is broken.
The PQ “is becoming a little bit the party of a generation and a party of the ( outlying) regions,” said Christian Bourque, executive vice president of the polling firm Léger Marketing. He sees no clear escape for the PQ from its steady decline in public support.
“The only way out of that,” he said, “is for them to come up with a new way of defining why sovereignty could be appealing for younger Quebecers who do not see themselves in the old politics, which is Quebec versus Ottawa, us versus them.”
If the Coalition party under François Legault translates its current popularity into an election win, it will be the first time a party other than the Liberals or PQ has been in power in Quebec City since the Union Nationale was defeated in 1970.
The situation has prompted speculation that a realignment predicted 30 years ago by the late Université Laval political scientist Vincent Lemieux is here. Lemieux called the PQ a “generational party,” like the extinct Union Nationale, and predicted its place would be taken by a party combining nationalism and more laissez- faire economics, as the Coalition does.
Legault, a former airline executive and PQ cabinet minister, created the Coalition party in 2011. It holds 21 of the National Assembly’s 125 seats, compared with 68 for the governing Liberals and 28 for the PQ. Despite having devoted the first 11 years of his political career to the PQ, Legault has no qualms about potentially driving a stake into his former party.
“For me, sovereignty was always a means to an end. The end was to have a better quality of life in Quebec for all Quebecers,” he said in a recent interview. But what he calls “50 years of polarization” between federalists and separatists drained energy that needs to be applied to more pressing problems.
“I think that 2018 could be the first election when the ballot question is not on sovereignty,” Legault said. “In 2018, there could be an election where Quebecers ask themselves, ‘Who has the best platform on the economy, on education, on health care?’”
PQ leader Jean- François Lisée, who replaced Pierre Karl Péladeau in October, 2016, responded to the low support for sovereignty by promising no referendum in a first PQ mandate. But instead of assuaging fears, the move seems to have been a gift to the Coalition. Federalist voters tired of a Liberal party that has been in power 12 of the last 14 years can vote for the Coalition, safe in the knowledge that whatever the outcome, there won’t be a referendum. And without even a faint hope of a referendum, nationalist voters have nothing to lose by switching to the Coalition party, which seems bestplaced to defeat the Liberals.
A Léger poll published Dec. 2 found the PQ had the support of just 23 per cent of francophone voters — key to deciding Quebec elections — compared with 43 per cent for the Coalition. Overall, the online poll of 1,010 Que- becers put the Coalition at 36 per cent, the Liberals at 32 per cent, the PQ at 19 per cent and the left- wing Québec Solidaire at 11 per cent.
Bourque said that what remains of PQ support is concentrated outside major cities and among those aged 55 and over, leaving a shaky sovereigntist edifice.
“Sovereignty is not dead, but it is certainly being marginalized,” he said. “It is a movement that is aging quickly.”
He identifies three pillars that historically supported the push for independence, and says they have crumbled for the younger generation.
“Being dominated by ‘ the English’ is not relevant. They have never known that era of Quebec,” he said. Similarly, with a National Assembly dominated by francophone Quebecers, the complaint that the levers of power are in the hands of others no longer applies.
“And the third one is recognizing yourself in a linguistic/ethnic brand of nationalism, and that doesn’t resonate anymore in the culturally diverse Quebec we live in today,” he said.
In 2016, political scientists Valérie- Anne Mahéo and Éric Bélanger made similar observations in a paper titled “Is the Parti Québécois bound to disappear?” Noting a decline in PQ support from 44 per cent in the 1994 election to 25 per cent in 2014, they attributed it to the aging of the party’s core supporters.
“As Generation Y ( and soon the millennials) occupies a larger place in the electorate, and as the weight of the boomers continues to decline, we should see further decline in the PQ,” they wrote. They said the PQ could hang on as long as 2034, but it could also unravel as soon as 2018.
If a Quebec without the PQ s eems unthinkable, Bourque points out that the party’s counterpart in Ottawa, the Bloc Québécois, once dominated federal politics in Quebec. But it never recovered from a crushing 2011 defeat.
“I think the same could happen (to the PQ),” he said.
While a dwindling number of Quebecers cling to the sovereigntist dream, Legault has switched to another vision, equally ambitious if not as romantic: a Quebec that has eliminated its wealth gap with the rest of Canada and no longer relies on equalization payments. He expects that Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard, robbed of the referendum bogeyman, will try to paint him as a separatist in federalist’s clothing.
But he says he has nothing to hide.
“Yes I love Canada,” he said. “Of course my first attachment is to Quebec, but I love Canada. I hope to contribute to Canada.”
BEING DOMINATED BY ‘ THE ENGLISH’ IS NOT RELEVANT.