Mulcair now scrambling to avoid tailspin in Quebec
MONTREAL— Less than a month ago, the NDP was poised to sweep Quebec for the second federal election in a row. Now, a repeat orange wave is indefinitely on hold and things could actually get worse for the New Democrats.
An Abacus poll published on Monday showed the NDP still leading the pack in Quebec but down 17 points from a mid-September sounding. Other polls have reported a smaller drop but all concur on the trend. As the election gets nearer, Thomas Mulcair’s party is falling from grace in Quebec.
There is no doubt the controversy over whether Muslim women should be required to unveil their faces to take the oath of citizenship is acting as a catalyst for the drop in party fortunes.
An overwhelming majority of Quebecers support a niqab ban. The NDP opposes it. But the New Democrat campaign had started to lose steam before the niqab appeared on the radar, for reasons more fundamental than the pent-up passions unleashed by a Conservative play on the identity front. From a Quebec perspective the NDP’s platform is an underwhelming one.
With the provincial government’s cost-cutting crusade already taking a toll on its social programs, it is hard to think of a NDP commitment more likely to miss the mark with Quebec’s progressive voters than the come-hell-or-high-water determination to balance the federal books. If anything, many Quebecers are suffering from an overdose of government-imposed austerity.
The promise of a national universal child-care system has short legs in a province that has set up the most comprehensive program in the country on its own.
Mulcair’s call to open the Constitution to abolish the Senate is similarly of limited appeal.
For one, it pits the NDP leader against Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard. He believes the Senate should be reformed, not abolished. And then there is the matter of Quebec’s own long-standing constitutional agenda. Couillard insists that a round on the Senate would have to include it as well.
On that score, Mulcair did not help his cause when he told Radio-Canada two weeks ago that the premier’s stance was just part of the game.
Going in the campaign, the NDP leader’s Quebec trump card was the sense that he was best placed to beat Stephen Harper. More so than any federal NDP initiative, it was the party’s victory in Alberta last spring that cemented Mulcair’s formidable pre-campaign lead in his homeprovince. The fact that the party is running third in the rest of Canada is now sinking in.
At this juncture, the question on everyone’s mind is whether the NDP has hit bottom in Quebec or whether it could continue to lose support between now and the vote. The short answer is that the New Democrats have no fixed floor of support in Quebec. It has yet to build a solid capital of loyalty.
Mario Dumont, the former leader of the Action Démocratique party, can testify to the perils of that.
In 2007, he came within seven seats of leading his young party to a minority victory against Jean Charest’s Liberals. But over the year and a half that followed, Quebecers were unimpressed by the ADQ’s performance in official opposition.
In an election held 20 short months after he had landed on the doorstep of provincial power, Dumont was left with only seven seats.
If the NDP is to avoid going in a similar tailspin, time is increasingly of the essence. Over the next four days, Mulcair will have his last best two opportunities to reverse the tide.
On Friday, he will take part in the last French-language debate of the campaign on Quebec private network TVA. Then, on Sunday, Mulcair will appear on Tout le monde en parle, Radio-Canada’s popular television talk show. Both events are expected to draw large audiences.
But Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is going into the debate on a more of a roll than Mulcair is and the niqab issue that has been the NDP’s nemesis in Quebec is bound to come up on both nights.
Mulcair is down two strikes. He desperately needs a home run if he wants his party to still be the Quebec home team after Oct. 19 Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.