Scapegoating ‘ethnic votes’ seems to be back

Twenty-two years after the general condemnation in Quebec of Jacques Parizeau’s rant against “ethnic votes,” the scapegoating of minority voters by nationalists may be making a comeback.

The province’s next general election isn’t due until October 2018. Yet, despite the ongoing smear campaign against the Liberal government by the opposition parties, police and more or less unwitting media, some nationalists are anticipating the “corrupt” government’s re-election. And for that, they blame the minorities.

The scapegoating could be easily ignored if it were coming from obscure bloggers. But it is given a certain respectability by its source in the mainstream media: columnists with past links to the Parti Québécois, writing in former PQ leader Pierre Karl Péladeau’s popular tabloids, including the province’s most-read daily, Le Journal de Montréal.

Currently the most prominent of these is Mathieu Bock-Côté, a prolific intellectual reported to have been a political influence on Péladeau.

“The PQ and minorities: whose fault?” was the headline on BockCôté’s column in Le Journal on Thursday, referring to that party’s lack of support among ethnic minorities. His answer: the latter.

“Who is closed to whom?” he asked. “Isn’t a massive vote, almost Soviet-like, against the sovereignists and the historic aspirations of French-speaking Quebec motivated more or less consciously by a ‘rejection of the other?’ Except that the other, in this case, is us.”

Never mind that the aspirations of sovereignists are not shared by even a majority in French Quebec, and that minorities, far from rejecting the Québécois, regularly vote for them as candidates and party leaders.

In effect, Bock-Côté blamed minorities for doing the same thing as French-speaking Quebecers: voting according to their own interests.

It’s like blaming Québécois for the Conservatives’ failure to earn their votes.

Another Le Journal columnist, former PQ minister Joseph Facal, revived the pejorative expression “blocking minority,” used in the 1990s by a publisher of Le Devoir to describe the cultural minorities thwarting the supposed sovereignist will of the majority.

Facal used it first in a column in Le Journal on Tuesday, in which he wrote that ousting the Quebec Liberal Party is “a matter of basic hygiene.”

He argued that because of the division of the opposition vote among several parties, the Liberals could form another majority government with only 33 per cent of the vote. And, he said, “the hard core of the Liberal vote is the new Quebecers for whom every election is a referendum on sovereignty.”

He said that in the next election, voters should “take a deep breath, hold our noses and vote for whoever is in the best position to throw out the QLP.”

But, he added, “even that remains very unlikely, because Quebec’s demographic evolution gives a constantly growing power to a blocking minority. It’s tragic.”

Facal didn’t give up, however. He returned to the subject in another column on Thursday, in which he proposed what amounts to an alliance among the opposition parties against what he again called the “blocking minority.”

He didn’t even bother dogwhistling a coded message.

With the express purpose of reducing the political influence of the minorities, he proposed that the parties unite behind a commitment that within a year of winning a combined majority in the National Assembly, they would change the electoral system.

They would replace the present single-member constituency system with proportional representation, in which seats in the Assembly would be distributed among the parties according to their respective shares of the vote.

“We would finally have a legislature that would reflect the popular will, which now is hampered by the rules of the game and the ethno-linguistic divide,” he said.

It remains to be seen how much support there is for Facal’s proposal. But the mere fact that a former minister would confidently make such an explicitly anti-minority proposal in a popular daily newspaper shows that the scapegoating of “ethnic votes” may no longer be unacceptable in Quebec.