PQ leadership, from PKP’s family drama to Lisée’s win, is political story of 2016

If PQ adopts no-referendum policy that would add impetus to realignment

The event of the year in Quebec politics was the last in a chain of events that began with the breakup of a marriage.

When Pierre Karl Péladeau abruptly resigned last May as Parti Québécois leader to fight for custody of his children against his estranged wife, show-biz personality Julie Snyder, he did favours to the PQ in particular and Quebec politics in general.

The province avoided the political crisis that could have occurred had Péladeau become premier and challenged the National Assembly’s ethics code by keeping, as he vowed he would, his controlling interest in Quebec’s dominant media empire.

And the PQ has been spared any political fallout from the current real-life reality show in Quebec in which Péladeau and Snyder have been publicly and bitterly squabbling.

Péladeau’s resignation also made possible the political event of the year. That was the election of Jean-François Lisée as Péladeau’s successor, with potentially far-reaching consequences for the future direction of Quebec politics. The main plank of Lisée’s platform was a commitment that a PQ government elected in 2018 would not hold a referendum on independence in its first term in office. This would end the PQ’s ambiguity since the last referendum in 1995 about whether it would hold another one the next time it formed the government. It’s intended to remove the possibility of a referendum as an issue in the next general election.

Even the possibility of a third divisive referendum on independence in less than 40 years has become an electoral handicap for the PQ, much as independence itself used to be. It’s the main reason the PQ has been shut out of power by the staunchly federalist Liberals since 2003 for all but 19 months, and that with a minority government. Ironically, it was to remove independence as an issue in a general election that the PQ first promised, in the early 1970s, to settle the question in a referendum instead.

For now, Lisée has only a weak mandate from his party for his proposal, since he was elected leader with only 50.6 per cent in the second count of votes cast by PQ members.

The apparent new pragmatism of the party’s aging membership will be tested again when the proposal comes up for approval at the PQ’s next policy convention, to be held next September.

If it does become a plank in the PQ’s 2018 election platform, it would be a step toward a longpredicted realignment of Quebec provincial politics along left-right lines instead of independencefederalism. That realignment is already underway, says Le Coeur des Québécois (The Heart of Quebecers), a recent book on Quebec’s evolution in the 40 years since the election of the first PQ government. The authors — commentator Marie Grégoire, political scientist Éric Montigny and pollster Youri Rivest — say the “Yes-No cleavage” on the independence question in the baby-boom generation is gradually being replaced by a left-right one as younger voters come of age. And they point to the arrival in the Assembly of third parties, the Coalition Avenir Québec to the right and Québec solidaire to the left, that are not defined primarily by their constitutional positions.

The rise of a multi-party system means Lisée’s no-referendum pledge could hurt the Liberals more than it helps the PQ. Conceivably, it could even help drop the PQ to third-party status.

In a multi-party system, one party’s action against another may benefit a third party more than itself. In the words of former PQ leader Jacques Parizeau, who brought Lisée into politics as an adviser, the first party becomes the “effective ally” of the third.

A recent example in federal politics is how the effective criticism of the former Harper government by the New Democratic official Opposition in Parliament ended up benefiting the Liberals in last year’s general election.

Similarly, if the PQ takes the referendum issue out of the next Quebec election, it could free voters who are dissatisfied with the incumbent Liberals, but who don’t want a referendum, to support the CAQ in particular.