The PQ seems to be dying off with boomers

Putting a young face on an aging party wouldn’t reverse demographic trend

In 1999, Bernard Landry, then a senior Parti Québécois cabinet minister, proposed what came to be known as the “dying federalist” theory: demographic “fatality” was on the side of the Quebec sovereignty movement, since older federalist voters would die off and be replaced by younger sovereignist ones.

It wasn’t true, even then, that once a sovereignist, always a sovereignist. By 1997, support for sovereignty among French-speaking voters less than 35 years old, as well as those between 35 and 54, had already declined significantly since the referendum two years earlier.

Since then, Landry’s theory has been replaced by another, what might be called the “dying Péquiste”: the PQ is a generational party, that of the baby boomers, and is already showing signs of dying off with them.

And unlike Landry’s theory, the “dying Péquiste” one is based on evidence, from nonpartisan academic researchers.

The latest is a study based on polling immediately after the last general election in 2014. The study was done for the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship by professor Éric Bélanger of McGill University and postdoctoral researcher Valérie-Anne Mahéo of the Université de Montréal.

The study suggests that the PQ will be a spent electoral force in less than 20 years, by 2034 at the latest.

It says the PQ is already in decline along with the relative demographic weight of the baby boomers. It contrasts the levels of support for the PQ between the boomers born before 1960 and the “millennials” born between 1980 and 1994, or Generation Y.

Bélanger and Mahéo found that in 2014, the PQ was the most popular party among boomers, but third in popularity among millennials.

While the PQ got 36.5 per cent of the boomer vote, it received only 22.6 per cent of the ballots cast by members of Gen Y.

(The most popular party in Gen Y? The Liberals, with 30.5 per cent of the vote, testimony to the resilience and potential for renewal of Quebec’s oldest party. The Coalition Avenir Québec party was second, at 26.4 per cent, and Québec solidaire was last among the four parties now represented in the National Assembly, at 16.2 per cent.)

The millennials might be called Gen WhyVote-for-the-PQ. They came of age in a Quebec and a world much different from those of the boomers. As a result, Bélanger and Mahéo found important differences in attitudes between the two generations.

Like the boomers, the millennials were more likely to identify themselves as Quebecers, either exclusively or primarily, rather than Canadian. But only a minority in Gen Y, 44.4 per cent, said they were very attached to Quebec, to 70.3 per cent of the boomers.

Also compared to the boomers, Gen Y was generally more left-leaning, more morally liberal, more open to cultural differences and less engaged with the issue of Quebec sovereignty.

The millennials were also less likely than the boomers to support the former PQ government’s proposed anti-hijab “charter of values.”

(Even in Gen Y, however, the charter had an overall positive effect on support for the PQ. This adds to the evidence against the theory that the PQ lost the election because of the charter. More on that, perhaps, in a future column.)

Even before the 2014 election, Péquistes were hearing the increasingly loud ticking of their party’s biological clock. That’s why they turned to André Boisclair, who was then 39, in their 2005 leadership election, and why Alexandre Cloutier, who just turned the same age, is the consensus frontrunner in the current PQ leadership race.

But Boisclair led the PQ to what was then arguably its worst election result, a third-place finish in the popular vote as well as seats in 2007.

And the evidence keeps mounting that another cosmetic surgery to put a handsome young face on an aging party won’t reverse the demographic trend against the PQ.