Saving the Parti Québécois from itself

Not since “the night of the long knives” in the 1981 constitutional negotiations, when an alliance between René Lévesque and other premiers broke down, have Quebec sovereignists felt so betrayed. Only this time, they feel betrayed by other sovereignists.

For the past week, Péquistes and sympathetic commentators have been fulminating against the supposed treachery of Québec solidaire at its policy convention last weekend in rejecting a tentative agreement among the pro-independence parties, including QS, for an electoral non-aggression pact.

Under former leader Pierre Karl Péladeau and his successor Jean-François Lisée, the PQ has insistently pursued the half-baked notion of “sovereignist convergence,” an alliance among the proindependence parties for the next general election, due in 2018. Its purpose was the election of a secessionist majority in the National Assembly. In effect, either the PQ or the Solidaires would not run a candidate in a riding where the other party appeared to have a good chance of winning if the sovereignist parties’ votes were combined.

Eventually, the PQ wore down the Solidaires’ resistance, and last month, the parties in the pro-independence umbrella group OUI Québec reached the tentative agreement on a process leading to political separation from Canada. At QS’s request, the parties also agreed not to make the agreement public until after the Solidaires’ convention.

There, the delegates resoundingly rejected the agreement. And in doing so, they did a favour to the PQ.

With support for sovereignty so low that pollsters don’t even bother asking about it anymore, Lisée has tried to eliminate separation as a handicap to his party in the next election. To avoid another “referendum on a referendum” favouring the federalist Liberals, Lisée has pledged that a PQ government would not hold a referendum on independence in its first term.

But an electoral alliance among pro-independence parties, based on independence, would have made it easier for the Liberals to introduce that issue into the election campaign.

It would also have drawn attention to the contradiction in the PQ leader’s position that while a Lisée government would also not promote independence in its first term, the party itself, and he as its leader, would continue to do so.

While the sovereignist non-aggression pact itself appears to be dead, however, the text of the agreement may not be, politically speaking. The text, made public Thursday, goes into some detail about the creation of a “constituent assembly” to draft the constitution of an independent Quebec. Yet conspicuously absent from the text is any mention of Lisée’s no-referendum pledge.

This appears to re-open a door that Lisée appeared to have closed. Already, Lisée’s reputation as an opportunist, earned in a long history of dizzyingly abrupt tactical “pivots,” was one of the reasons the Solidaires balked at entering into an alliance with him. Another was their rejection of the PQ’s identity politics, which has become a third dividing line in Quebec politics, in addition to the ones between federalism and independence and between left and right.

Now Lisée needs to perform another 180-degree turn, away from the small, far-left Solidaires and his own proposed new PQ policy program designed to appeal to them, toward the centre, where the votes are, and the Coalition Avenir Québec. For it’s the centre-right, soft-nationalist Coalition that increasingly threatens the PQ’s position as the leading alternative to the governing Liberals, and perhaps even its survival.