Quebec is key to Tory leadership hopes
In normal circumstances, the crowning this week of Dominique Anglade as the first female leader of Quebec’s Liberal party would have ranked as a top political development.
Anglade, a former deputy premier of Haitian origin, made history on two fronts. It is the first time in Canada that a major provincial party is led by a woman from a visible minority community.
But in the midst of a pandemic, her swift elevation to the leadership — made possible by the mid-week defection of her only opponent — received little more than a cursory acknowledgment.
If the Quebec Liberal party gets a bump in the polls over the next few weeks, it will be due to growing unease over Premier François Legault’s failure to put a lid on the spread of COVID-19 in Montreal rather than as a result of Anglade’s coronation.
The Quebec Liberal party is hardly the only party to see its leadership developments sucked into the pandemic black hole.
If anything, the short shrift afforded to the changing of the official opposition guard in the National Assembly compares enviably to the abysmal indifference that attends the ongoing federal Conservative leadership campaign in Quebec.
Friday was the cut-off day to sign up Conservative members who will cast a ballot in August.
No one expects the Quebec membership ranks to have swelled as a result of the exercise.
With no Quebec horse in the race, even diehard Conservatives are having a hard time becoming engaged in the battle to select a successor for Andrew Scheer.
As a result, Quebec is very much still up for grabs by either Erin O’Toole or Peter Mackay.
Over the week leading up to the membership sign-up deadline, each picked up some significant Quebec endorsements. But neither emerged as the prohibitive favourite.
MacKay boasts the support of half-adozen Quebec MPs along with that of former cabinet colleagues such as Lawrence Cannon and Jean-Pierre Blackburn.
But two of the caucus’ heavy hitters are unaligned.
Quebec lieutenant Alain Rayes is set to remain neutral. And Gérard Deltell — who was initially considered the Quebec MP most likely to run to succeed Andrew Scheer — backed O’Toole in the last leadership contest but has so far remained on the sidelines.
Over on the other side, Christian Paradis, Stephen Harper’s next-to-last Quebec lieutenant, along with strategist Carl Vallée, joined O’Toole’s camp, as did former Senate speaker Leo Housakos.
MacKay is said to have the support of Brian Mulroney and the former prime minister does still have a significant network of contacts in Tory circles.
But whether that support can mitigate MacKay’s shortcomings on the language front is an open question.
In their pitch to Quebec members, O’Toole’s leading supporters, including Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, have been playing up the argument that he is more fluent in French.
There is good and bad news for the Conservative Party of Canada in the tepidness of Quebec’s modest conservative cohort toward the leadership choices on offer.
On the plus side, most Quebec Conservative members can probably live with either MacKay or O’Toole as leader.
This campaign is not in the process of splitting the party’s Quebec wing wide open.
On the minus side, that reflects the widespread conviction in Quebec political circles that neither O’Toole nor MacKay is liable to work miracles for the party in the province.
It is not that Quebec is free of antiTrudeau sentiment but rather that the bulk of it is increasingly spoken for by the Bloc Québécois.
In the most recent batch of polls, the Bloc outscored the Conservatives in voting intentions by a margin of two to one.
In a leadership selection system that gives each riding the same weight regardless of the size of its membership, Quebec — with fewer Conservative boots on the ground than any of the three other larger provinces — could have a supersized impact on the outcome of the Conservative leadership vote.
There has been speculation that the social conservative wing of the CPC could emerge as the kingmaker in August.
The other two leadership candidates — Derek Sloan and Leslyn Lewis — hail from the religious right as do most of their supporters.
On a ranked ballot, to be the second choice of as many of them as possible could make the difference between victory and defeat.
But Quebec is a bigger prize. And the irony is that if either O’Toole or MacKay courts the religious right, the more he stands to hurt his prospects in a province whose voters have little or no time for rearguard battles on abortion rights and same-sex marriage.