Will Quebec deliver a surprise?
Liberals and Tories are taking nothing for granted as they tailor their campaigns to the province’s shifting political winds.
Quebec has sprung more than its share of political surprises in the last three federal elections, turning pre-campaign conventional wisdom on its head in each instance.
Over the past decade, Canada’s second largest province has become Exhibit 1 in support of the notion that campaigns matter. The NDP in 2011, the Liberals in 2015 and the Bloc Québécois in 2019 successively came out of election night in a much stronger position than any of the prewrit polls had foreseen.
That goes a long way to explain why despite favourable poll numbers, the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois — who together held 67 of the province’s 78 seats in the last Parliament — are not taking anything for granted.
That’s particularly true of the Bloc. It has entered the campaign in its strongest position in a decade. But in 2011, a solid position in the pre-campaign voting intentions did not prevent Gilles Duceppe from having the floor fall from under his sovereigntist party.
In the past, Quebec voters have been more inclined to turn to the BQ when they doubted that their provincial government — because of its federalist convictions — was up to the task of standing up to Ottawa. But very few Quebecers doubt Premier François Legault’s capacity to stand his ground. That could make it harder for the Bloc to mobilize nationalist voters behind it and, as a result, limit its growth potential on Sept. 20.
In 2019, both the Liberals and the Conservatives failed to pay attention to the BQ until it was too late to reverse that party’s momentum. This time, the Conservatives are taking no chances. Their 10 seats in the province may hang in the balance.
The Conservatives are proposing a pact that would see Erin O’Toole offer Legault many of the items in the Bloc’s platform — and on the premier’s nationalist agenda — on a silver platter.
Those include more immigration powers for Quebec; an openness to allowing the province to collect the federal income tax on Ottawa’s behalf; the extension of Quebec’s language laws to federally regulated industries; and a commitment to keep the hands of a Conservative federal government off the province’s contentious Bill 21 on secularism.
It is as if Legault and Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet were the authors of the Conservatives’ Quebec platform.
The Liberals have also tailored their offerings to the province’s current political reality, and to the need to stay on the good side of its popular premier.
On his way to an election call, Trudeau dodged the bullet of a language battle by putting forward changes to the Official Languages Act that dovetail with the Coalition Avenir Québec’s plans to consolidate the province’s own language regimen.
Like the other main leaders — but against all expectations of the federal Liberal party, given its history — the current prime minister has no objection to Legault’s project to unilaterally declare Quebec a nation in the province’s section of the Constitution.
This summer, Quebec and Ottawa signed a multibilliondollar child-care agreement that would see more money flow for the province’s popular child-care program just in time for Legault’s re-election campaign next year.
In Quebec, where daycare availability — not affordability — is the issue, the Conservative proposal to scrap the Liberal plan and replace it with tax credits is widely seen as a solu the tion in search of a problem. Make no mistake, child-care policy could become a defining wedge issue.
From Legault’s perspective, almost any outcome on Sept. 20 would come with a silver lining.
But on balance, given how lucrative his relationship with a minority Liberal government has turned out to be, and given the billions of federal dollars flowing in his own pre-election window, the premier would likely shed no tears if Trudeau were returned to office next month — albeit with a minority of seats
Volatility has not always been a feature of the Quebec federal scene. Under Pierre Trudeau, federal Liberals had steadfast support in the province. Between 1993 and 2011, the Bloc consistently dominated the province’s federal landscape.
The federal mood swings that have attended the past three elections have coincided with a dramatic shift in the provincial tectonic plates. One phenomenon cannot be divorced from the other.
That period has seen the once-mighty Parti Québécois reduced to a rump in the National Assembly, the emergence as a political force of the left-leaning Québec Solidaire and, of course, the election of a government that so bridges the long-standing sovereignist-versus-federalist divide that it has been fading into oblivion.
Under the Coalition Avenir Québec, the voting intention landscape has stabilized at both the federal and provincial levels. It may be that after a decade of electoral windowshopping, the province’s voters have found a mix they can live with for more than one election cycle. If so, a stay-thecourse outcome could be this year’s Quebec election night surprise.