How much will Quebec really see? Watson
QUEBECERS VOTED FOR CHANGE. HOW MUCH WILL THEY REALLY SEE?
Quebec voted for change Monday night. The party it gave a parliamentary majority to, the Coalition Avenir Québec, had change as its theme. Change is almost always the winning theme when the Outs beat the Ins, as they almost always do when the Ins have been in for 15 years straight with only an 18-month interruption. But it’s not clear just how much change Quebecers got. A right-ish performance-focused non-separatist party went way down (the governing Liberals), while a right-ish, performance-focused non-separatist party (the Coalition Avenir Québec or CAQ) went way up — all the way to a majority. At the same time, a leftist separatist party (the Parti Québécois) went way down (to only nine seats) while a hard-leftist separatist party (Québec solidaire or QS) went way up (to fully 10 seats). Yes, that’s right, the PQ’s at nine seats and devastated, its leader resigning, while the QS is at 10 seats and delirious, its leader a new political heroine.
One undeniable change is that the Liberal-PQ alternation of the past half century has been broken and with it, says François Legault, the new premier, the stale constitutional debate of the past 50 years. Praise be if that’s true! The new government (CAQ) and the new official opposition (the Liberals) are both non-separatist parties, even if Legault was once a PQ minister. He said in his acceptance speech, in English, that he wants a strong Quebec within Canada. But, though he didn’t say this, he also officially wants the constitution fixed. The CAQ’s base is francophone Quebecers and we’ll see what happens when the rest of the country says no to reform, as it almost certainly will. The separatist parties (the PQ and QS) got only 33 per cent of the vote combined. But the problem has always been moderate but potentially combustible nationalists.
The CAQ is widely seen as yet another populist nationalist party in the mould of Trump’s Republicans and the nationalist populists of Europe. And, to be sure, immigration reform is part of its platform. But its proposal is to reduce the number of immigrants from 50,000 a year to 40,000, where it was in the early 2000s, and not to reduce spending on welcoming them so as to do a better job of assimilating them. Anyone who had heard about CAQ’s supposed racism would have been shocked by the post-election interviews of winning candidate after winning candidate who was well-dressed, well-spoken, calm, reasonable and goodhumoured — in fact, the perfect reflection of middle-class francophone Quebecers.
Speaking of reasonable, defeated premier Philippe Couillard gave the most elegant of concession speeches, saying kind things about his opponents, denying he was bitter about the loss and urging his supporters not to be, and leaving office with his head held high for what he had accomplished in his four and a half years as premier. And he does have a lot to be proud of. The long North American recovery obviously helped him as much as it has helped all recent incumbents. But he and his government of economic stars drawn from the private sector made hard choices in their first couple of years that have improved Quebec’s finances well beyond what recovery did. As Couillard said, Quebec now finds itself in an unusual position: books in good shape, unemployment low, job shortages. In a world where most politicians’ assertiveness runs in inverse proportion to their knowledge, it was refreshing to have a calm, wellspoken, fact-loving brain surgeon in charge of the body politic.
So how did he lose, if things are so good? He’s immensely articulate but lacks the common touch. He appointed an abrasive health minister who shook things up — to many practitioners’ and patients’ annoyance — but despite it didn’t seem to shorten waiting lists or de-crowd emergency rooms. And doing hard things early alienated many whose oxen were gored by restraint. So now he’s out of a job and may be out of politics, too.
We economists have a thing we call “incentivecompatibility ,” the gist of which is that it’s important to make sure incentives are structured so as to get people to do the right thing. If the lesson of Philippe Couillard is that doing the right fiscal things means getting booted from office, that doesn’t help Quebec in the long run.