Legault has to refine his policies to appeal to anglos

François Legault makes a good point when he says that Quebec anglophones have too long been a captive electorate for the Liberal Party.

He made this assertion during in an interview this week with The Gazette’s National Assembly bureau chief, Kevin Dougherty, saying that if he has one message to deliver to anglophones, it is that the Liberals take the anglophone community for granted. It might be something of an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

The anglo vote has been in the Liberal pocket for decades now because the only viable governing alternatives in the province for most of that time have been the Liberals and the Parti Québécois. And of course the PQ’s fondest purpose is to break up Canada and make Quebec an independent country, something that all but a minuscule segment of Quebec’s anglo population is dead set against.

As such, the Liberal imperative has been to pursue the more fickle francophone softnationalist vote, rather than to cater to its devoted anglophone constituency. As a result, anglos to a large extent vote Liberal out of resignation, not enthusiasm on most occasions. Not so much for the Liberals as against the PQ.

In that respect, Legault and his nascent Coalition Avenir Québec offer what is potentially a welcome alternative for anglo Quebecers.

A former PQ cabinet minister and longtime sovereignist, Legault now proposes to put aside the decades-old national question that has long dominated Quebec political discourse and focus on what he rightly calls Quebec’s real needs. These, he suggests, include an overhaul of the province’s underperforming health-care and education systems, and systematically boosting Quebec’s sagging economic capacity by enabling job creation and fostering innovative business ventures.

This is all well and good as far as it goes. But in responding directly to anglophone community concerns, Legault doesn’t go very far, not even in some respects as far as the Liberals. If anything, he has displayed a deaf ear to anglo concerns, as exemplified by his neglecting to utter a word in English during his opening remarks at a West Island town hall meeting last fall. And this from a guy who grew up in Ste. Anne de Bellevue.

The centrepiece of his education policy is a proposal to abolish school boards. But where there is much to criticize about the performance of school boards, they are the English population’s only directly elected representative bodies and their elimination would be a significant loss to the community. The “service centres” with which he proposes to replace them are ill defined and would lack the democratic legitimacy of the present boards.

On language policy in general, he offers nothing better than the Liberals. He is foursquare for maintaining Bill 101 in its present form, as are the Liberals, and agrees with the initiative to force stores with English brand names to add French descriptors to their signs. While he opposes the PQ policies of extending francization rules to businesses with fewer than 50 employees and ending free choice in CEGEP education, there is no question for him of extending access to English primary or secondary schools to immigrants whose first language is English, something that would be a modest gain for the anglo community and negligible to the French education system.

There has been no talk from Legault so far about assuring access to health care for anglophones in their own language. Even some CAQ policies not directly related to language are questionable, such as performance-based pay for teachers and having the Caisse de dépôt et placement sink more of Quebecers’ pension funds into upstart ventures in Quebec just because they are operating in Quebec.

It is, on the whole, not surprising that Legault has so far failed to attract any prominent anglophone community figures to stand as candidates for his party, or that polls still show the anglo vote heavily invested in the Liberals, for all their failings.

That’s not to say Legault should give up on anglos, or that anglos should give up on him. He’s a credible candidate for premier, and a man of integrity. Voter volatility is such that the CAQ could still catch something like the unexpected Orange Wave that the NDP surfed in the last federal election. But to get anglos to switch from the devil they know, Legault and his party will have to offer anglophones more than they have so far. More than just saying that they are neither the Liberals nor the PQ.