NDP rules elsewhere, but what’s left in Quebec?
Our neighbours to the west will be voting on June 7, and, oh wow, what an interesting night that will be. If you’ve been following the polls in Ontario you’ll know that what had been Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford’s race to lose, he is now on the verge of losing - to Andrea Horwath’s New Democratic Party.
Why this is happening, based on a consensus of pundits, is fairly simple. Voters, seemingly convinced the Liberals have to go after 15 uninterrupted years in power, are shopping hard for the best option to replace Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government.
Having taken a deep whiff of Ford’s smorgasbord of undercooked policies, electors have found the Trump-lite leader wanting, and have determined the NDP is worth a look. Hence, with the election hitting the home stretch Horwath appears to be pulling ahead of Ford and is even flirting with turning her current 21-seat caucus into a majority government.
Should the former union activist pull off the upset, she will lead the second and only other NDP government Canada’s largest and most powerful province has ever had. The first was in 1990 when the party under Bob Rae came out of nowhere to defeat David Peterson’s Liberals and form a solid majority government. With the addition of Ontario, Canada in the early 1990s had three provincial NDP governments, the others being British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
If Horwath seizes power, the NDP will again hit this high mark of three out of 10 provinces. She will have socialist soulmates in Alberta’s Rachel Notley, who pulled off the all-time NDP upset in the red meat conservative turf in 2015, and B.C.’S John Horgan, who clings to power thanks to the support of three Green Party members after Liberal Christy Clark, who won more seats, was squeezed out in last year’s election.
We need not go into the details on the feud between Notley and Horgan over a pipeline, except to say such a thing has not been seen in the land since Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador exchanged heated words and idle threats over the Hydro Quebec’s Churchill Falls power deal. That dispute was taken to the Supreme Court of Canada in December and a decision is expected soon.
If Ontario goes orange next week, that will mean the three most populous and economically potent provinces besides Quebec will have shifted left, with unknown consequences for things like federal policy in areas of environment and health.
Here in Quebec, the political system has never actually produced a self-defined socialist party with even the faintest hope of forming government. The irony to that is that if you ask experts which province has the most state intervention in the lives and livelihoods of the citizenry the answer would almost invariably be Quebec.
From nationalized energy, to liquor stores, to subsidized daycare, to parental leave, to IVF funding, to a drug coverage plan, to a huge pension fund mandated to invest in local enterprises, Quebec has a tradition of cradle-to-grave social and economic intervention.
The case could be made that once upon a time the Parti Quebecois was in everything but name Quebec’s socialist party. Were it not for its sovereignist raison d’être, the sweeping reforms the PQ under René Lévesque pushed through from agriculture to education would stand as the party’s most remarkable legacy.
Subsequent Liberal and PQ governments have more or less maintained the tradition of governmental omnipresence, known as the “Quebec model,” with the occasional effort to rein it in, notably former premier Lucien Bouchard’s cutbacks to health and social service budgets, and of late, the Liberal government’s so-called austerity policies.
With a Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) government looming on the horizon with a platform that tilts rightward, Quebec voters for the first time since the 1960s face ideological choices instead of taking sides on the “national question.” This perhaps opens the door for growth for a party that makes no bones about its socialist proclivities, Quebec Solidaire, for those unable to vote for the Liberals, CAQ or PQ.
In Ontario, who knows? With only a few days to go, enough voters might decide Kathleen Wynne isn’t so bad after all, and another surprise result could be in the works.