Strong vote of confidence weakened PQ’s Lisée

Party’s strong vote of confidence in leader came at a price, likely to be paid later

Last weekend’s Parti Québécois convention was a triumph for Jean-François Lisée. Or at least that was the impression created by the near-record 92.8 per cent confidence vote the PQ leader received.

Actually, Lisée was weakened by that vote, not strengthened.

Because, in order to get it, he made a major concession to an especially anglophobic minority among the convention delegates.

And that concession, and Lisée’s weakness in making it, may be a double handicap for the PQ leader in the general election due by Oct. 1, 2018.

The real victory at the convention belonged to the PQ language hawks, not Lisée.

For more than a decade, they’ve been advocating discrimination in public funding against institutions identified with the Englishspeaking community, including hospitals and universities as well as the colleges known as CEGEPs.

Those institutions serve Quebecers of all languages, and, like all Quebec institutions, their funding is based on the numbers they serve.

The PQ anglophobes want to shrink the anglo institutions’ financial base, by reducing their share of funding to the proportion of Quebecers with English as their mother tongue.

The hawks were getting nowhere, until the week before the PQ convention, when Lisée caved in to them so they wouldn’t vote against his leadership.

Lisée made a deal for the hawks to drop a convention resolution that would have barred non-anglophone students from English CEGEPs. That idea is unpopular among Quebecers who want young francophones to be able to become bilingual.

In return, the PQ leader accepted a devious “compromise” to reduce the number of non-anglophone applicants to English colleges. Approved overwhelmingly in the convention’s deciding plenary, it includes the mother-tongue rule for financing English CEGEPs, which would cut their funding by half.

So, for the first time, a major Quebec party has adopted a policy of official financial discrimination against institutions of what nationalists like to call “the world’s best-treated minority.”

And it’s a principle that can logically be extended to other anglo institutions, which is what the hawks want: today Dawson College, tomorrow McGill. And the day after that, why not the MUHC?

In the plenary after the confidence vote was safely behind him, Lisée made a show of standing up to the hawks by having PQ members of the National Assembly, including himself, speak against other language resolutions that were then rejected.

One in particular would have reduced the PQ to self-parody, proposing linguistic segregation in daycare for toddlers too young to speak.

But Lisée chose his battles carefully. It was apparent from the resolutions forwarded to the convention by party associations that the proposals he opposed had little support anyway.

The hawks’ original CEGEPs resolution, however, might have had the backing of about a quarter of the delegates. Lisée probably could have had it defeated in the plenary, too. But even if only half its supporters had held that against him, his confidence vote might have dropped below 80 per cent, uncomfortably low for a PQ leader.

Still, the deal Lisée made may backfire against him, and his party.

The compromise CEGEPs language policy is so vague that even its supporters disagree over what it means. Only one part is clear: the financial assault on the English colleges.

This makes a lie of an assurance elsewhere in the party’s policy program of “respect for the English-speaking community and its institutions,” damaging the PQ’s credibility.

It also exposes the PQ to attack for indirectly targeting young francophones in particular, by forcing the English CEGEPs either to discriminate against them in admissions, or to deter them from applying by lowering the quality of the colleges’ teaching.

And there is Lisée’s leadership. In the past, the PQ leaders who were most popular with voters were René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard, who had the backbone to stand up to their party’s radicals.

As his capitulation on English CEGEPs showed, that’s not Lisée.