Vive le Québec conservateur

PHILIP CROSS

Conservatism in Quebec is undergoing one of its periodic revivals, its bedrock support resurfacing as the tide recedes for the sovereignty movement. No matter whether the CAQ (the Coalition for the Future of Quebec) or the incumbent Liberal party wins this fall’s provincial election, Quebec will be governed by a party opposed to sovereignty and in favour of lower taxes and less government. Meanwhile, polls put support for the federal Conservatives at second place in Quebec, the party profiting from the public’s disinterest in sovereignty and the chaos in the Bloc Québécois, which can’t even settle on a leader.

Despite Quebec’s left-wing image, conservatism has often found it to be fertile terrain for its ideas. For decades after Confederation, Conservatives dominated the federal scene in Quebec. This support eroded with Wilfrid Laurier’s ascension to the Liberal leadership and then abruptly ended in 1917 when the Conservative federal government led by Robert Borden ignored warnings that supporting conscription would damage the party in Quebec for a generation.

The conservative movement reappeared at the provincial level under the Union Nationale led by Maurice Duplessis, which officially absorbed the provincial Conservative party. The UN ruled Quebec for 19 years between 1936 and 1960 on a platform of small government, nationalism and hardline anti-communism (financed in part by Pierre Trudeau’s staunchly conservative father). The Union Nationale appealed to Quebec’s Roman Catholic majority by reminding the faithful that “Heaven is blue” (the Union Nationale colour) and “Hell is red” (the Liberals). The Catholic Church sent its own anti-socialist message by forbidding its followers from belonging to the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, forerunner to the NDP, until 1943. Even after six years of the Quiet Revolution under Liberal Premier Jean Lesage, the province again returned the Union Nationale to power in 1966. Eventually the party was supplanted by the left-wing Parti Québécois as the main opposition to the Liberals when Quebec politics began descending into an increasingly sterile debate between sovereigntists and federalists to the exclusion of other pressing issues.

The exclusive focus on sovereignty for years helped suffocate support for conservative parties, giving the misleading impression that Quebec voters had permanently shifted to the left. The return of Quebec to its more conservative roots follows Quebec journalist Alain Dubuc’s observation that the province’s “DNA is more Duplessist than socialist.” One key to electing the separatist Parti Québécois was convincing conservative rural and working-class voters to vote for a nationalist party whose agenda was increasingly captured by left-wing unions, intellectuals and professionals that profited from the expansion of the state.

Quebec is hardly the first society to be mesmerized into voting against its natural instincts by one overriding issue. For nearly a century after the American Civil War, southern states angry with Republicans for ending slavery voted for a series of increasingly centralizing and interventionist Democratic candidates, despite the South’s then preference for decentralized government. It took the Democrats’ promotion of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s to push the South solidly into the Republican camp for most of the last halfcentury.

The conservative instincts of much of the Quebec population were never far below the surface, even after the Quiet Revolution began in 1960. This is reflected in the support for federal parties ranging from Social Credit under Réal Caouette in the 1960s to Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives in the 1980s. More recently, populist parties such as the ADQ under Mario Dumont and the CAQ led by François Legault have filled the conservative void in provincial politics.

The dissipation of Quebec’s separatist movement is leading to a realignment of voting patterns in Quebec, with many voters outside Montreal finding their way back to traditional conservative parties (Montreal differs from the rest of Quebec because of its concentration of Anglophones, immigrants and the usual anti-capitalist rabble-rousers found in the downtown of many cities). Part of the CAQ’s popularity is its promise to focus on pocketbook issues while shelving the separatist debate indefinitely. The collapse of the federal Bloc Québécois let its former leader Michel Gauthier to throw his support to the federal Conservative party.

Conservatism in Quebec is different from conservatism elsewhere in Canada. For example, the provincial capital of Quebec is a bastion of conservative support, unlike most capital cities in Canada that vote for parties pledging to increase the number of civil servants. As Quebec pollster Jean-Marc Léger explained in his book Cracking the Quebec Code, “People from Quebec City are bureaucrats who favour the political right and private enterprise” not a combination observed very often in capital cities.

Léger also found that Quebecers identify with conservative values such as tradition, family, entrepreneurship and living outside of cities more than people in the rest of Canada. It is not surprising to see these voters returning to the conservative fold. However, Legault’s election is not a sure thing. As Mario Dumont recently noted, Quebec has a habit of developing cold feet for transformative change at the last minute, as with the 1995 sovereignty referendum and recent provincial elections when the ADQ and CAQ led in the polls as voters wanted to keep their options open. The resurgence of the conservative movement, however, reminds us that Quebecers never closed themselves off to the option of voting conservative.

CONSERVATIVE INSTINCTS OF MUCH OF THE QUEBEC POPULATION ARE NEVER FAR BELOW THE SURFACE.