The Fast Forward effect
IT’S A REFERENDUM ELECTION because PKP and social media got Quebecers thinking ‘Fast Forward’ to a referendum
This is a really weird Quebec election, fought on late-20th-century political issues with early-21st-century disruptive technology.
The ballot question is a referendum on a referendum. Quebecers lived through that in 1980 and 1995 — in real time, not as a prospect. Now online technology, nearly all of it invented since then, takes the campaign to the Internet, smartphones and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Not to mention all-news television, and the 24/7 news beast.
So we’re in both a time warp, and a Fast Forward moment in this campaign. And the Parti Québécois is completely out of step with both the past and the future. Which is why its campaign is failing.
In January 1980, in a debate on monetary union with Robert Bourassa, the PQ’s finance minister, Jacques Parizeau, told Quebecers they’d “have the queen on the dollar for a few more years.”
This was four years before the invention of the first cellphones, which cost thousands of dollars and were as big as shoe boxes; 10 years before the Internet had any commercial applications with the creation of the World Wide Web; and 25 years before the invention of the smartphone, which heralded the arrival of social media.
But nearly 35 years later, PQ Leader Pauline Marois said the same thing as Parizeau, that Quebec would use the Canadian dollar and ask for a seat on the board of the Bank of Canada. She’s also mused about no borders between Quebec and Canada, and Quebecers retaining Canadian passports. Another Groundhog Day moment, as in Jean Charest brandishing his Canadian passport at nearly every stop in the 1995 referendum campaign.
How did this campaign become a referendum election, when the PQ cruised into it clearly ahead of the Liberals, in majority territory?
The answer is obvious: one guy, one image, one sound bite — Pierre Karl Péladeau, the fist pump and his call “to make Quebec a country.” Marois was in the shot, smiling and leading the applause.
The fist pump is one of two indelible images of the campaign, the other being “le shove,” four days later, when Marois pushed Péladeau away from the podium, saying “I’ll answer this,” to a question of whether the Québecor media mogul was ethically conflicted by his IT division having millions of dollars of contracts with the Quebec government (a story broken that day by one of his own newspapers, Le Journal de Québec).
The fist pump and “le shove” completely reframed the election conversation. One reminded Quebecers of a referendum, something most don’t want to live through again. The other had them doubled over in laughter. Both moments are hilariously captured in a musical blog by Frédéric Poirier, again on Péladeau’s own newspaper websites.
The independence of the news media has become one of the sidebars of this campaign, and it must be said that both Québecor TV channels and its newspapers, and their websites, have been more than fair in their coverage, and even somewhat aggres- sive in covering their controlling shareholder, who is not used to being asked questions as opposed to giving orders.
Since those two defining negative moments, Marois and her war room have done everything to change the channel and the campaign conversation, with no apparent success.
First, they tried to make it about the economy, when they don’t have a story to tell in light of 25,500 job losses last month alone, not to mention a $3-billion deficit and net debt of $175 billion, 50 per cent of GDP.
Then, Marois tried to make it about Philippe Couillard’s character and corruption under the Charest Liberals.
And finally, in a desperation play last weekend, the PQ obviously shopped a story to Le Devoir about university students from outside the province trying to get registered on the voting list.
Quebec requires six months of residency to vote, and we’re now at the end of the seventh month of the school calendar. New residents also need to declare their intention to remain here.
When chief electoral officer Jacques Drouin looked into it during the weekend, he found applications in four out of five Montreal ridings in the story were substantially lower than in the 2012 election. “This is not a strategy of registering ineligible voters — we don’t think there is any organization,” he said, adding that “people, often anglophone students, discover a sudden interest in Quebec politics.”
But before hearing from him on Sunday, Marois and five ministers of her government went public in person or online, including her justice minister, Bertrand StArnaud, who called a news conference where he said: “We don’t want this election stolen by people from Ontario and the rest of Canada.”
René Lévesque once famously said: “A Quebecer is someone who lives here.” This PQ is not the party of the founding father. It’s a crowd that would say or do anything to win. Which is one of the reasons they’re losing.