Marois squanders her political capital

Every government has a limited amount of political capital, and limited time in which to spend it. This is particularly the case for minority governments, and none more so than the present government of Quebec.

Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois were elected a year ago with just 32 per cent of the popular vote and only 54 seats in the 125-member Quebec National Assembly, nine short of a majority. The Liberals won 31 per cent of the vote and 50 seats. The Coalition Avenir Québec won 27 per cent of the vote and 19 seats.

Marois formed a government with no mandate, least of all for another referendum on sovereignty. She could not have got a referendum question adopted by the legislature.

Nor has she been able to enact her amendments to Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, Bill 101. Her government’s Bill 14 is being allowed to die on the order paper. It would have repealed the bilingual status of municipalities whose nonfrancophone population fell below 50 per cent, forced small businesses with only 26 employees to work in French, and required Englishlanguage junior colleges to admit anglophone students in preference to francophones and allophones with higher marks.

Instead, Marois has decided to spend what political equity she has on the Charter of Quebec Values, telling government employees what to wear to work in the morning.

All government workers — including municipal employees, health care and education providers — would be covered by a religious dress code that would allow small crosses but not large ones on necklaces, while banning yarmulkes, turbans and hijabs. But it would be OK to wear a ring with a Star of David or earrings with a Muslim crescent moon.

Municipalities, hospitals and post-secondary education institutions would have a five-year exemption. The opting out will not be a renewable escape clause, according to Jean-François Lisée, the minister responsible for the Montreal region, home to most of Quebec’s non-francophone and multicultural residents.

If Marois was looking for a channel changer, she certainly got one. No one in Quebec is talking about the economy, and how Quebec lost 5,000 jobs last month, and more than 30,000 the month before that.

There’s broad support for the proposition of a secular state. The dress code, complete with pictographs of what’s permissible and what isn’t, is another matter. It’s racial profiling, pure and simple.

If Marois was looking for a channel changer, she certainly got one. No one in Quebec is talking about the economy, and how Quebec lost 5,000 jobs last month, and more than 30,000 the month before that. Quebec’s unemployment rate of 7.9 per cent is nearly a full point above the national average of 7.1 per cent. In the context of the charter debate, no new jobs will be created in Quebec. Why would anyone move there, or locate a new business in such an inhospitable place?

The proposed dress code is clearly unconstitutional — article 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the 1982 Constitution Act entrenches freedom of conscience and religion, as well as freedom of speech and association. So does the 1975 Quebec Charter of Rights, in identical words. Marois has evidently received this opinion from her own legal advisers, but decided to play the identity card anyway.

What’s interesting is the lack of third-party endorsements from the sovereignty camp, especially among the progressive left in the Montreal area. In just a week since its release, support for a charter of values dropped from 57 per cent to 43 per cent in one poll, with 42 per cent opposed.

To say nothing of the vocal opposition from everyone else. All 15 municipalities on the Island of Montreal oppose the charter. As do the Jewish General Hospital and the McGill University Health Centre. As does McGill itself. Not to mention other stakeholders.

And within the sovereignty family, the charter has created a split among the separatist cousins, the Bloc Québécois. Maria Mourani, the only Bloc MP from Montreal, was expelled from caucus and then quit the party for opposing the charter. She’s a member of Montreal’s large Lebanese community. So much for sovereignist outreach to multicultural communities. Even Québec Solidaire, a pro-sovereignty movement with two MNAs from Montreal, is uncomfortable with the charter. It’s no mystery — both MNAs are from ridings with significant multicultural populations.

If Marois is seeking to polarize voters, and marginalize third party support for the CAQ, she may succeed to that extent. But she has also introduced a profoundly divisive question. And she is proposing a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

And so far as that goes, she is spending what little political capital she has for nothing.