Big-tent PQ campaign collapsing on itself

Internal divisions exacerbated by bungled approach to secession

You don’t need a poll to know which way the wind’s blowing in Quebec’s election. You can see it in the leaders’ itineraries, their choice of issues, even their tone of voice. All point to a Parti Québécois campaign that is floundering, badly. Thursday night’s televised debate, far from turning things around, seems only to havemademattersworse.For the dilemma Pauline Marois fought without success to escape on the night was the same that has ensnared her from the start.

It is this: In a campaign that has rapidly polarized on federalist versus separatist lines, the federalist vote is consolidating around the Liberals, while the separatist vote is fragmenting. As a separatist party, the PQ was already facing a more basic dilemma, namely the visceral opposition of a large majority of Quebecers to the central plank in their platform. But with that have come other problems: Unsure of a solution, without the certainty of their inevitable triumph that once bound them, the party’s divisions have widened.

They are divided in two distinct but overlapping ways: between left and right, explicit in the erosion of support to the Québec Solidaire party on its left but also visible within the party; and between the hardliners, many nearing retirement age, who demand secession be pursued at the first opportunity, and the soft-pedallers who insist more time is needed to prepare the ground.

Unable, or unwilling, to regain the votes lost to its left, the party under Marois has instead reached out to its right: first, with the successful effort to tap into the province’s cultural anxieties via the “charter of values”; then, more spectacularly, with the recruitment of Pierre Karl Péladeau, in a bid to bolster the party’s credibility with economic conservatives (conservative, relative to the Quebec political spectrum, which is to say slightly less interventionist than the other interventionists).

The enlistment of Péladeau as a candidate, after his notorious battles with the province’s unions, could be anticipated to enrage even moderate left-wingers. So the economic message was downplayed: Rather, his involvement was justified in the name of achieving sovereignty. Péladeau would fill out the PQ coalition, bringing with him the voters it needed to win a majority, and with it begin the long march to independence. In the service of this higher ideal, party luminaries like Jean-François Lisée argued, distinctions between left and right faded into insignificance. There was room for both under the separatist big tent.

It wasn’t only Péladeau, with his now-famous fistpump at his unveiling, who indulged this belief. Media commentators, not all of them separatist-leaning, greeted it as a masterstroke. The response from party activists was broadly enthusiastic. On the campaign trail, Marois, perhaps giddy over her coup, allowed herself to muse publicly about post-secession scenarios, in which Quebec and Canada would agree to do without customs or borders and share the dollar.

But there is a point where a big tent can become too broad, and collapses in on itself. Talk of sovereignty seemingly validated the warnings of the Liberal leader, Philippe Couillard, that the PQ, once elected, would force the province into another referendum: a prospect that repels even some separatists. Péladeau’s arrival, and the enthusiasm it aroused, only seemed to make this more likely. Sensing the threat, the soft nationalists and tired federalists who had been parking their votes with the Coalition Avenir Québec began to desert it for the Liberals.

Marois has since retreated into ambiguity, not daring to commit to hold a referendum but not daring to rule it out, either. But the more clear it has been that she cannot answer the question, the more her opponents have asked it. Under repeated interrogation during the debate, she held fast to her pledge not to hold a referendum in a first PQ mandate “unless Quebecers want one.” But it is too late for such evasions: By now they will only confirm the public’s suspicions. Nothing less than a categorical denial would do, and even that would probably not be believed — except by the hardliners, who would revolt.

Indeed, Marois’s attempts to straddle the party’s internal divisions risk not only alienating both sides, but fatally damaging her own credibility in the bargain. The polling data on this is striking. Large majorities of Quebecers say they do not want secession, do not want a referendum on secession, and do not think the PQ would have a mandate to hold one if it won. And yet an equally large majority believes it would do just that. The secession issue is becoming a trust issue.

Marois’s performance Thursday night will do nothing to reverse that. Attacked from both the left and the right — from QS leader Françoise David for betraying the left’s hopes, after marching with striking students in 2012; from CAQ leader François Legault, for breaking a promise to abolish the province’s health tax — the premier appeared rattled, angry, defensive. Meanwhile Couillard, in his first debate, looked cool and unruffled — benefiting as much from Marois’s discomfort as from being spared such scrutiny himself.

With its campaign imploding, the PQ has fallen back on its one trump card, the values charter. The message, never subtle, has grown increasingly shrill: The Liberals, insists PQ minister Bernard Drainville, “are for the niqab.” There are still two weeks to go, of course. Miracles can happen. But whatever gains the party was likely to wring out of this issue have probably already been achieved. Voters whose priority is the dress worn by civil servants will be with it till the end. The rest, looking at the state of the province’s economy, its finances, its public services, will wonder how a party could become so detached, not only from its ideals, but reality.