No place to go for anglophones
Illusion of alternative to Liberals vanished once campaign began
Free yourself of the Liberals!
That was Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault’s message to English-speaking Quebecers in the lead-up to the Oct. 1 election.
Speaking in English at a party convention on May 27, Legault reached out to Quebec’s 1.1 million anglophones, assuring them his party had no intention of taking the province out of Canada.
“We’re in a new era. There’s no threat of referendum anymore, so there’s no reason to stick with the Liberal Party, which has taken you for granted for decades.
“Free yourself. Join the team for change,” he said.
But the illusion of a viable alternative for non-francophone voters seemed to go “poof” as soon as Quebec’s 42nd general election campaign got underway.
Legault’s proposal to cut immigration to 40,000 arrivals per year from 52,000 and reject newcomers who fail to pass a French test and Quebec values test within three years appears to have sent most non-francophones scurrying back to the safety of the Liberal Party.
Two-thirds of non-francophones oppose the CAQ’s immigration policy, polls suggest.
And Legault’s dire warning on Sept. 6 that current levels of immigration could result in his grandchildren not speaking French only deepened the disconnect with English-speaking voters.
“I think it’s fair to say that now that Legault’s gone all Quebec identity and immigration, I see a lot of anglos saying, ‘Not again,’ said Philippe Fournier, creator of the Qc125 vote-projection blog.
The campaign has had its bright spots for English-speakers, notably Quebec’s first-ever English televised leaders’ debate on Monday. It was an opportunity to vent over the National Assembly ’s unanimous resolution against the Bonjour-Hi greeting — and to elicit promises from all four leaders to maintain the Secretariat for Relations with English-Speaking Quebecers created by the Liberal government.
But out on the election trail, the return of identity politics has sounded a sour note.
Legault’s decision to link immigration to the survival of French escalated what could have been a reasonable discussion on the appropriate number of newcomers, said Graham Fraser, a visiting professor at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and formerly Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages, as well as a journalist and author.
“To touch that existential soft spot is to transform a policy issue into an existential survival issue and send a pretty powerful message to everybody else that he thinks we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution,” Fraser said.
Depicting immigration as a threat to Quebec identity pushes the buttons of English-speaking Montrealers, for whom diversity is a fact of life, said Harold Chorney, a professor of political science at Concordia University.
“I can walk outside my door and it’s completely multicultural and multi-ethnic,” Chorney said.
“I think strongly that the majority of the English-speaking community detests the xenophobic, anti-immigrant line,” he said.
That sort of discourse is offensive to a community where “virtually everybody is a descendant of an immigrant,” he said.
This election marks a historic moment — the first time in nearly half a century that both of Quebec’s leading parties favour staying in Canada, notes Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies.
“We’ve just woken up to this new reality where the sovereignty issue is not part of the election anymore,” he said.
But despite the realignment on sovereignty, English-speaking voters are still between a rock and a hard place, Jedwab said.
Make that a ROQ and a hard place, he specified, referring to the mainly francophone regions outside Montreal, or rest of Quebec (ROQ), where Legault has aimed his messaging during the campaign.
“Right now, the CAQ is emerging as a very regionally rooted party, a non-Montreal party,” Jedwab said.
By framing issues in terms of “francophone versus non-francophone; immigrant versus nonimmigrant,” Legault’s message “somehow gets translated to them or us,” he said.
That’s why, aside from urbanites tempted by Québec solidaire, there’s little chance most anglos will be exploring new political horizons in the Oct. 1 vote, he said.
Polls suggests 70 per cent of anglophones intend to vote Liberal.
“I call them ‘Liberals by birth,’ ” Jedwab said. “They’ve grown up with the Liberals. To switch to another party is a very big step,” he said. “So even if at the beginning of the campaign, a lot of people were questioning the Liberals, I think what’s happened over the course of the campaign is that issues are still being framed on the basis of language and identity, and that has made any frustrations that anglophones feel about health care, for example, become secondary,” he said.
The polarization between multiethnic Montreal and the ROQ is particularly noticeable in CAQ strongholds like the “couronne,” or outer suburbs north of Montreal, noted Simon Langlois, a professor emeritus of sociology at Université Laval and author of Refondations nationales au Canada et au Québec (Septentrion, 2018).
“For now, it’s hard to see how this polarization could fade away,” he said.
Most English-speakers also oppose the CAQ’s promise to abolish school boards, seeing it as an attack on one of the community’s few democratic institutions.
As for the PQ, even though leader Jean-François Lisée got high marks for his performance in Monday’s English debate, there’s no
enthusiasm for his proposed Bill 202 — a tougher language law that would force companies in Quebec with between 25 and 50 employees to function in French, and require students at English universities to pass a French proficiency test before graduation. Lisée would also compel anglophone CÉGEP students to attend a French CÉGEP in the hinterland for a term.
Concordia University politicalscience student Christopher Kalafatidis, 22, is planning to support the Liberals on Oct. 1.
“I want a government that will stand for the anglophone community strongly and I want a party that will stand for diversity strongly. Those are two things I really care about,” said Kalafatidis, the president of the Political Science Students Association of Concordia University.
Kalafatidis said he welcomed the greater number of options facing voters in this campaign.
Québec solidaire is “absolutely young and hip. I think their brand is incredible,” he said.
“It’s nice to see a party that can advocate for an independent Quebec and inclusion,” he added.
While the Green Party is unlikely to win a seat, “hopefully just to exist
is positive for Quebec, because it shows there’s popularity for environmental issues,” he said.
Even though CAQ’s immigration stance has alienated anglos, the issue is not galvanizing the community the way the debate over the PQ’s Charter of Values did in 2014, Kalafatidis said.
“I haven’t felt the same type of fear or anger or frustration this time around,” he said.
“It’s really going underneath the radar. I think it’s because people don’t want to believe that the CAQ has the capacity to form a government. That could work to the community’s disadvantage, because if we don’t take the threat seriously and we don’t mobilize, the CAQ could form a government,” he said.
In 2014, English-speaking Quebecers — who normally have low voter turnout — showed up at the polls in droves to defeat the PQ and its values charter, said Claire Durand, a polling expert and professor of sociology at the Université de Montréal.
She said, “2014 was the first election where non-francophones voted as much as francophones.”
For example, participation rates on the West Island rose to 81 per cent in Jacques-Cartier, 79 per
cent in Nelligan and 77 per cent in Robert-Baldwin, outpacing the provincial average of 63 per cent, she said.
In 2008, turnout in those ridings hovered between 40 and 50 per cent, rising to the high 60s and 70s in 2012, Durand said.
The non-francophone vote also played a decisive role in some ridings outside the English-speaking heartland in western Montreal, she said.
“We have this idea all non-francophones are in the West Island. This has changed a lot,” she said, noting that non-francophones account for 35 per cent of voters in the longtime PQ stronghold of SteMarie— St-Jacques, which Québec solidaire’s Manon Massé won by fewer than 100 votes in 2014.
It was one of three ridings the PQ lost in 2014 due to the non-francophone vote, Durand said.
The other two were Crémazie (now Maurice-Richard), and Laval-des-Rapides, both won by the Liberals.
The risk now is that the high level of cynicism among anglophones will cause them to disengage from the election, Jedwab said.
“It’s a group that feels that it’s Liberal by birth but it hasn’t felt very empowered. It doesn’t feel that its votes have a lot of influence over the way in which decisions get taken in Quebec,” he said.
“The risk is that if the CAQ gets elected, then it probably will have even less, which is a paradox, because the community already feels disempowered and will feel even more disempowered if the party that’s elected is a regionally driven party with a regional agenda.”