CONRAD BLACK
Quebec election has potential to break up Canada.
The Quebec election on April 7 could be a decisive turn, though the campaign for it is not starting out in that direction. In the 2012 election, Pauline Marois’s Parti Quebecois won just 32% of the vote, to 31% for Jean Charest’s Liberals, and 27% for the pantomime horse of the Coalition for the Future of Quebec (CAQ). The CAQ is neither a federalist nor separatist party, and is led by François Legault (former péquiste minister of education and a political charlatan), and by the high-tech centimillionaire, Charles Sirois, the affable bearer of a picaresque, even dilettantish, career. The CAQ is the sort of movement that pops up in Quebec from time to time when there is dissatisfaction with the government but a lack of real confidence in the official opposition. This was the status of the Bloc Populaire at the end of the Second World War and of Action démocratique du Québec in 2007 in the midst of the Charest era. They are always straddlers trying to make the centre between opposed and established parties a position of strength, but it is never enough to win, or even long survive.
The polls this week show the traditional pattern: the PQ is up from 32% in 2012 to 37, the Liberals are up from 31% to 35, and the CAQ is down from 27% to 15. That vote should continue to evaporate as Quebec faces the clear choice that it now has between a premier it now knows but not necessarily for long enough to have become altogether tired of her, as it did with Charest, and a Liberal leader (Philippe Couillard) it knew well as Charest’s health minister, but who is, in leadership terms, a new face.
Traditionally, the Quebec electorate has been divided into five approximately equal voting blocs: the Rouges, the dyed-in-the-wool French Quebec Liberals; the Bleus, the old-time Quebec conservatives; the nationalists; the non-French; and the floating vote. The Liberals generally take all the Rouge base, and all the non-French. The genius of Maurice Duplessis in taking an unequalled five terms as premier, was to get the Bleus and the nationalists and more than half the floating vote and about a quarter of the non-French to vote together, for him. His most assiduous disciple, Daniel Johnson, largely resurrected this voting alliance in 1966, but died in office in 1968. The Parti Québécois, as assembled by René Lévesque, took all the nationalists, almost all the floating vote and a chunk of the conservatives. Some of the Liberals also came with him from that party when he decamped from it in 1967, after service as a prominent minister in Jean Lesage’s Quiet Revolution Liberal government.
The nature of the nonFrench vote is that it is heavily concentrated in West Montreal and parts of the South Shore and Eastern Townships near Montreal, delivers huge Liberal majorities, but is not proportionately represented in the legislature, (which has grandiloquently called itself the National Assembly since 1969). And the nature of the floating vote is that it follows not only trends but especially the generally perceived need in Que-
bec for the only thoroughly French government in North America above the municipal level (Quebec’s) to be led by a chef, a strong personality who can always be relied upon to defend the French Quebec interest with vigour, panache and distinction.
Duplessis, Lesage, Johnson, Lévesque and Bouchard were all beneficiaries of this status; Robert Bourassa was a sort of French Mackenzie King — colourless and cautious, but clever and agile, and Jean Charest was perceived as somewhat more amiable than Bourassa but not as intelligent. Joseph-Adélard Godbout (premier from 1939 to 1944) and Jean-Jacques Bertrand (1968-1970), were admired as good and dedicated men, but insufficient in both force of personality and cunning to be a chef national.
With the exception of Paul Sauvé, Duplessis’s chosen successor who died in office less than four months after Duplessis did, none of the other premiers in living memory really commanded profound public support.
Quebec sociological and voting patterns are certainly not immutable, but there is no reason to doubt that the third-party vote, including the 8% that now is attributed to the arch-separatist Solidaire party, (up from 6% in the 2012 election), will shrink in favour of the PQ as the clear choice emerges between a new premier and a new leader of the opposition. For those looking for a chef, neither of the chief protagonists seems predestined to ride into the folkloric and political history of the province as Duplessis and Lévesque have.
But Couillard, though he has been a tactically awkward party leader for his first few months in the position, is a medical doctor who worked in the Middle East for a time, and was a well-respected health minister who managed the astonishing achievement, in the chronically over-unionized province, of reducing local union accreditations in his sprawling department. He is a cultured, worldly and civilized man, and he and his wife could pass as a traditional Quebec family in the best sense.
Pauline Marois may conceivably reap some feminist votes, but she is very workmanlike and almost sadistically unglamorous. She speaks
The province cannot afford to secede and can only sustain its accumulated debt because it is joined by its fiscal cheekbone to the hip of the rest of the country
like the educated, but ordinary, person she is, but in inspirational terms, she could not lead Quebec across the Jacques Cartier Bridge — with or without the buttressing it will require to avoid collapsing. (The more galvanizing recent Quebec leaders mentioned above spoke with either evident culture, or vivacity of wit, or passion, or like Pierre Trudeau on occasion, all three.)
The reason this election could be a watershed is that the logjam of Canada must break. Quebec now is like a separate country, where in the great majority of the province that is French, all official efforts are dedicated to unilingual isolation and to a pretence of sovereignty, which cannot really be enacted because, contrary to the implications of the referendum questions in 1980 and 1995, Canada would then discontinue its $2,000 per-capita t ransfer payments to Quebec, (which is, in practice, about $4,000 to any man, woman or child in a family or equivalent unit that might be tempted by Quebec’s independence option). So Quebec operates an overwhelmingly white collar economy where few people add real value to anything, but everyone is secure, comfortable and in the traditional manner of the bourgeois clerisy, respectable.
But the province cannot secede and can only sustain its accumulated debt because it is joined by its fiscal cheekbone to the hip of Canada. Quebec has no influence in Ottawa, where it long prevailed, and Ottawa is only an impersonal paymaster in Quebec.
If the Quebec government would tear down the barricades its nationalist political and media elites have erected opposite Canada, reassume the headship of all Quebecers and all French-Canadians, and thus set it itself back at the head of about 30% of Canadians and resume its position on behalf of a co-governing founding people of Canada, which has, despite the sniggering and sabotage of the Quebec nationalists, become one of the world’s most successful countries, the revolution in Canadian morale and élan and the ambience of Quebec would be electrifyingly positive.
Ultimately, Quebec should rejoin the country or be partitioned so that Canada retains the federalist areas (including the First Nations), while the sullen, overpaid separatists, if they really are irreconcilable, can give unsubsidized independence a try.
In this one respect, and without violence, we may have something to learn from the ordeal of Ukraine. If Marois wins a majority, the Harper govern- ment should consider taking the initiative with a referendum of its own along those lines.
As the premier’s remarks in announcing the election on Wednesday made explicit, the election is fought largely on the “Charter of Values,” which does not assure equality of sex (that is already guaranteed) or “religious neutrality” (likewise), as she claimed, but rather imposes the state atheism of almost all the conscient separatists, embarrassed as they are that they owe their cultural survival to the Roman Catholic Church.
The idea that the National Assembly can decree whether people may wear religious symbols is as abominable as the regulation of wearing political or commercial symbols on T-shirts, and it is sacrilege, a cultural offence that yet survives. About a quarter of Quebecers, most of them French, are still religious practitioners. All is in place for Dr. Couillard to be a seminal and benign figure in Canadian and Quebec history, and his campaign-opening comments on Wednesday incited hope.
Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair should do all they can to assist the Quebec Liberals, though not too much should be expected of Mulcair, given the Faustian bargain he has made with the separatists, to try to retain the support of the Bloc Québécois, which the NDP displaced by offering the same separatist wine in a relabelled NDP bottle.
Harper and his government and party don’t have enough support in Quebec to influence the outcome, other than by some blunderbuss utterance that would assist Marois. This could, at least, be that rarest of recent Canadian phenomena, an interesting election.