The deeper bad news for the PQ

THE PARTY’S BIOLOGICAL CLOCK is ticking as support from young people continues to dwindle

Bernard Landry of the Parti Québécois once came out with something that became known as “the dying federalist theory.”

Landry, who was then deputy premier in Lucien Bouchard’s PQ government, said “fatality” was on the side of sovereignty, since, he happily observed, older federalist voters were dying off, and being replaced by younger sovereignist ones.

That was in 1999. And even then, it wasn’t true.

Two years later, sociologist Claire Durand of the Université de Montréal proved that the premise on which Landry’s theory was based — once a sovereignist, always a sovereignist — was false.

Durand showed that support for sovereignty did not increase in the five years after the 1995 referendum, and that among voters under 35 years of age, it declined.

Since then, the demographic tables have turned on the sovereignty movement, and especially Landry’s party.

There are still young people who support sovereignty.

There were hundreds of them at last year’s convention of the hardline sovereignist Option nationale party, causing the meeting’s moderator to comment, to laughter: “C’est le ‘wet dream’ des autres partis.”

And the PQ has been able to Botox its appearance by recruiting youthful candidates like former student leaders Léo Bureau-Blouin and Martine Desjardins.

But among young voters, Bureau-Blouin and Desjardins probably aren’t as popular as their counterparts in the party’s own youth in the 1970s, when teenagers would put up PQ candidates’ signs in their rooms, along with posters of rock stars.

In terms of support for the PQ and its policies, what once appeared to be the party of youth and a vision of the future now is the party of an old Quebec afraid to let go of its past.

Throughout the campaign for Monday’s general election, polls have suggested that the PQ is significantly more popular among voters age 55 and older than among younger ones.

So is one of the central planks in the PQ’s election platform, the “values” charter, which would ban the wearing of religious symbols by public employees on the job.

And Durand, now Quebec’s leading expert on political polling, wrote recently on her blog that support for sovereignty is no longer higher among young voters than among older ones.

Among French-speaking voters age 18 to 34, support for sovereignty fell from above 60 per cent before the 1980 and 1995 referendums to about 40 per cent in the past two years, she found.

It’s been more than 18 years since the last referendum. Maybe that’s why some elderly sovereignists, such as 83-year-old Jacques Parizeau, reacted with such excitement to Pierre Karl Péladeau’s raised-fist announcement that he was running for the PQ in this election “to make Quebec a country.”

And in the last week of the campaign, the voice of the PQ became that of 89-year-old Janette Bertrand, expressing her fears of Quebec’s growing diversity.

As early as 1986, only 18 years after the PQ’s founding, one of Quebec’s leading political scientists, Vincent Lemieux, predicted that it would be the party of a single generation and would last only 30 or 35 years.

It appeared in 2007 that Le- mieux’s prophecy would be fulfilled, when the PQ fell to third place in both the party standings and vote share.

The PQ recovered, however, returning first to the official opposition in 2008, then to power, as a minority government, in 2012.

So the Parti Québécois has survived Lemieux’s prediction, and it will continue to be a force if it is still one of the top two parties in the National Assembly after Monday’s election.

Still, if you listened carefully during the campaign, you could hear the ticking of the PQ’s biological clock getting louder.