Election 2018: Asking the right question
Well it’s election time for sure. All you have to do is check out just how many new funding programs the government has announced. By my count it’s around 60 a day but then again I may have missed one or two. As for the opposition, not a day goes by without the PQ or the CAQ pointing out that all this spending is merely an attempt by the Liberals to buy votes, as if their own promises of free education, more money for health care and a coq rôti in every pot were anything different.
One thing that irritates me, okay, one of the many things that irritate me, is the constant moaning from all three opposition parties about how anglo-quebecers allow themselves to be held hostage by the Liberals. How is it, the pundits cry, that the Liberals can, at best, ignore the anglophone population and at worst take it for granted and still get their votes? When will English-speaking Quebecers wake up and look elsewhere?
Strangely enough this constant bleating reminds me of an old and slightly off-colour joke. Two young men sitting on a park bench notice an extremely attractive girl strolling by wearing a pair of those skin-tight jeans favoured by today’s youth. One says to the other, “I wonder how you get pants like that on?” The other replies, “Once again you’re asking the wrong question?” And this is exactly what the PQ, the CAQ and Québec solidaire are doing.
Surely a better question would be, “Why don’t anglophones voter for us?” If the opposition could answer this they wouldn’t have to concede the anglo vote each election and they could stop treating these same voters like the brain dead who, zombie-like, plod to the polls chanting “I will vote Liberal.”
It wasn’t always like this. In the hay day of the Union Nationale, even under Maurice Duplessis, many English-speaking Quebecers voted against the Liberals. Right up until the arrival of the Parti Québécois in 1968 there was always an alternative acceptable to those who saw Canada as worth preserving.
The alternatives today don’t offer the same security. For the PQ to wonder why anglophones stick with the Liberals and don’t buy into their dream of a new Quebec can be explained in two words: Camille Laurin. The father of Bill 101, as he came to be called, was a psychiatrist before taking up politics and in his efforts to improve the status of the French language in the province treated anglophones as mental patients for worrying about their place in the proposed promise land. With that kind of diagnosis is it any wonder anglo voters have shied away from returning to the PQ therapy couch.
Party leader, Jean-françois Lisée can promise no referendum on sovereignty in the first term of a PQ government until the cows come home and it won’t make a difference to voters attached to their present country. It’s like the dentist telling you that your tooth will eventually have to come out but he’ll give you a couple of aspirins now and do the yanking later.
As for the Coalition Avenir Québec the grandchild of the Union Nationale and the son of the ADQ - its attempt to straddle the middle ground between Liberals and PQ may bring electoral success but it’s unlikely to garner a lot of Anglo support. Even though leader François Legault swears up and down that his party will never hold a referendum most voters know the value of a campaign promise.
Voters are also likely to remember that at one point or another Legault has also mused about getting rid of Englishlanguage school boards, making CEGEPS subject to the same language restrictions as elementary and high schools and a general tightening of language laws in the work place. Nevertheless, some anglo voters, genuinely tired of the Liberals, will likely make the switch looking for the “change” the CAQ is promising. But if I were François Legault I wouldn’t plan on a rush to the CAQ banner just yet.