A distant view of big-change Quebec election
Everyone seems to be agreed on two propositions about the general election held in Quebec on Monday: that it represents momentous change, and that separatism has disappeared from the Québécois political agenda, perhaps for good. So let me play my accustomed role of halfwit contrarian for a moment. When I separate the major parties of Quebec into mostly-federalist and mostly-sovereigntist bins, I find that the Liberals and the CAQ got 64.6 per cent of the popular vote between them in 2014. The Parti Québécois and Québec solidaire managed almost exactly 33 per cent.
In the great volcanic eruption of 2018, these figures stand at ... hmm, that’s strange: the federalists are at 62.2 per cent, and the sovereigntist parties once again got almost exactly 33 per cent of the vote share.
I know, I know: it is not quite as simple as that. In 2018, as everyone acknowledged during the election campaign, the overall centre of gravity on the spectrum seemed to have slumped over to the pro-Canada side, and votes can only go to an available party. Liberal leader Philippe Couillard seems like the firmest, friendliest federalist to have led Quebec’s government since Lord knows when — it might be a matter of 50 years or more. J.-F. Lisée had put his nationalist PQ firmly in the kick-the-can mode that nationalist parties everywhere sometimes find it necessary to adopt.
But, again, the gormless outsider notices that these parties were treated pretty brutally in the election. The new premier is hardly an ultra-federalist, as his background shows, but a soft nationalist who favours constitutional revision. Meanwhile, the two-headed Québec solidaire beast has a hard-nationalist position that is, in a way, more radical than the traditional approach to separatism. They did not put a third sovereignty referendum on the agenda, and no one ever thought QS was a serious contender for power anyway, but the official QS plan, in the event of victory, was for an immediate national convention to draft a new republican constitution for Quebec.
In short, the immediate prospect of a referendum vanished from the campaign, but the voters, on net, did shift away from the Liberals to the much more identitarian CAQ, and they also did shift away from a confused, decrepit PQ to a more vigorous separatist party with a different strategic approach.
None of this looks like the death of hard Quebec nationalism, per se. It seems more like part of a process of reinvention, though not necessarily a successful one. As committed federalists are provisionally trusting the PQ Old Bolshevik Legault not to make too much trouble with the rest of Canada, hard nationalists are giving up on the traditional PQ coded racial appeal in favour of a more inclusive narrative. Now Quebec must ultimately separate not because it is an extended family; it must ultimately separate because it has a radical political identity that is irreconcilable with neoliberal, monarchist, oil-pumping, English-speaking Canada.
This sometimes seems accurate, even though Legault’s agenda for governing Quebec is conservative enough, with its tax cuts and its decentralizing approach to showpiece services, to make conservatives elsewhere drool with envy. (They practically fell over one another racing to congratulate him after his victory.) On immigration and other national questions, there ended up not being much daylight between Legault and the Liberals. But even Québec solidaire was, on that front, not a perfect progressive refuge: QS had one veiled female Muslim candidate, which was a first for Quebec, but appealed (or pandered) to nativist sentiment by proposing to forbid public servants who exercise “coercive state power” from wearing religious symbols, hijabs or turbans.
Quebec voters do not really fall into two neat bins. With a couple of sunrises intervening between now and the election, the emerging quantitative story is one of Liberal voters staying home in astonishing numbers. Pretty clearly this is a fatigue issue. Liberals occupying whatever position on the sovereignty spectrum did not like Couillard enough anymore, and did not fear François Legault enough to drag themselves to the polls. This is a problem for the “change election” narrative, because those voters are presumably still out there, and haven’t actually changed their minds about anything.
In the meantime, declaring the cause of Quebec sovereignty dead is always premature. Or, at any rate, you cannot prove anyone who says so wrong! The PQ and QS each got about onesixth of the votes on Monday. Viewed one way, a sixth is not much; but when you consider what a basket case the PQ is, and how patently sophomoric the QS’s platform is, it might be argued that the underlying impetus of Quebec nationalism must still be fairly robust.
What happens if one or the other of these parties gets their act together and find a leader (I would recommend no more than one) with any charisma whatsoever? The Bernie Sanders/Jeremy Corbyn style of grad-student leftism has not really had a convincing, fair test in Canada yet, and no one knows what the limits of such a campaign might be. If it would work anywhere, one imagines that Quebec would be the place.