Quebec Solidaire has PQ on the ropes

Three years ago, millennial voters helped Justin Trudeau’s Liberals vault from a distant third place in the House of Commons to a majority government.

Next Monday in Quebec, that same cohort could deal a lethal blow to the once mighty Parti Québécois.

PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée spent the past month trying to restore his party’s status as a contender for power.

If all had gone according to his original plan, his party would by now have overtaken the Coalition Avenir Québec and emerged as the most likely to beat premier Philippe Couillard’s Liberals.

Instead, the last stretch of the campaign finds the PQ in a battle for survival against Québec Solidaire — a party that only held three seats in the last National Assembly.

With less than a week to go until election day, the left-wing party has overtaken its sovereigntist the exchanges with a Byzantine attack on Québec Solidaire, casting it as a party controlled by a Politburo-style group of backroom ideologues.

Buoyed by favourable reviews of his performance on two previous occasions, Lisée may have believed that by turning his guns squarely on his less-experienced rival, he would neutralize her for the rest of the debate and leave the podium confident that he no longer had to worry about guarding his left flank.

But Massé held her ground and, in the post-debate debriefings, Lisée’s tack was almost universally panned. As far as I can remember, no PQ leader has ever earned reviews quite as scathing for a debate appearance as Lisée did last week.

The only public opinion sounding published post-debate has Québec Solidaire ahead of the PQ among francophone voters. That may not translate into scores of QS seats on election night, but it does cut the legs from under the péquiste narrative that their party is a contender for government.

Lisée has since doubled down on his debate rhetoric. On Monday, he described Québec Solidaire as an anti-capitalist party and its program as one rooted in Marxism. It is not clear what audience the PQ leader is pleading with.

Over the course of the campaign, the rise in Québec Solidaire fortunes has been fuelled by a steady influx of millennial support. They are in no small part drawn to that party’s aggressive climate change agenda, as well as to its inclusive policies.

But the PQ’s difficulties with the younger voting cohort go back further than last week’s debate, the current campaign or Lisée’s leadership tenure. The party lost its footing among millennial voters over its secularism charter and has never managed to recoup it.

For in Quebec, as elsewhere in Canada, millennial voters are more likely to identify with Justin Trudeau’s view that diversity is a virtue than the older cohort. For the most part, younger voters have no time for parties that flirt with identity politics. And they reserve the passion Quebec’s baby-boomers once expended on sovereignty for matters pertaining to the environment.

For the first time since they came of age, boomers do not outnumber the younger cohorts of the Quebec electorate. If millennials show up in droves to vote next Monday, the PQ could be in for a rout of historic proportions. Based on past turnout, that may be a big if. But a party — federal or provincial — that bets on millennial voters staying home on election day is one that is living dangerously. All material in this publication is the property of SaltWire Network., and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior consent of the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for statements or claims by advertisers. The publisher shall not be liable for slight changes of typographical efforts that do not lessen the value of an advertisement or for omitting to publish an advertisement. Liability is strictly limited to the publication of the advertisement in any subsequent issue or the refund of any monies paid for that advertisement.