Poilievre will have to watch dance partners
MONTREAL The re-election with a stronger hand of Quebec premier François Legault will inevitably shake things up on the federal-provincial scene. So will Danielle Smith’s selection as the successor to Alberta premier Jason Kenney.
The incoming Alberta premier and her re-elected Quebec counterpart bring to their relationship with Justin Trudeau’s government a long list of grievances and an uncommonly adversarial spirit.
In the pursuit of his demands, Legault has the advantage over Smith on at least three scores.
■ His majority victory comes with the gift of time. Trudeau will be facing voters again long before his Quebec counterpart ever has to worry about a third term. Legault may even opt for political retirement before the end of his second term. On the heels of back-to-back majority victories that reshaped the Quebec political landscape, he has little left to prove.
Smith, on the other hand, is without a seat in the Alberta legislature and has little more than a half-year to prepare for a general election. Her first campaign as leader is not lining up to be a cakewalk.
■ In contrast with Alberta, a province that is anything but central to the federal Liberals’ re-election chances, Quebec is essential to Trudeau’s electoral fortunes. The prime minister and the premier have several supporters in common. That translates into more federal leverage for Legault than Smith could ever hope for.
■ Within the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), Legault’s leadership is essentially uncontested. Support for his demands for more powers for Quebec extends beyond the ranks of his caucus. He faces a divided and much weakened opposition in the national assembly.
On Thursday, Smith secured Kenney’s succession by an uncomfortably small margin. Her signature project of a so-called sovereignty act to allow Alberta to decline to apply the federal laws her government dislikes is widely seen as unconstitutional within her own ranks. It also has yet to be tested in a general election.
Sooner or later, there will be major collisions between Trudeau and both premiers. But the prime minister is not the only federal leader who has cause to be bracing for those conflicts. This week’s provincial votes put the Conservatives and their latest leader in a difficult spot.
For different reasons, Legault and Smith make for uncomfortable political bedfellows for a party that aspires to form the next federal government.
Take Legault. In a bid to secure more support in Quebec but also to fend off the Bloc Québécois, the federal Conservatives — under Pierre Poilievre’s predecessor — sought to act as a mouthpiece for the Quebec premier.
At times, it was fair to wonder if Legault asked for the moon, Erin O’Toole would have chartered a spaceship to try to deliver it.
In return for the Conservatives agreeing to carry his water on Parliament Hill, Legault tried to steer Quebec voters away from the Liberals and New Democrats in last year’s federal election.
Perhaps because the CPC had so little to show for the premier’s implicit endorsement once votes were counted last fall, the party’s nationalist ardors have cooled since then.
Over the course of his leadership campaign, Poilievre agreed with the other main contenders that the federal government should intervene in court in support of ongoing challenges to Legault’s secularism and language laws. O’Toole had always maintained that he, as prime minister, would watch from the sidelines.
More recently in the House of Commons, the Conservatives voted with the Liberals to defeat a Bloc Québécois bid to expand the application of Quebec’s language law to federally regulated businesses operating in the province.
Soon, Poilievre will have to decide whether he actively supports Legault’s demand for more power on immigration.
The CAQ’s contentious record on minority rights, coupled with the dubious immigration rhetoric that was a feature of the premier’s reelection campaign, could make that a non-starter.
If voters in the rest of the country have heard anything about the recent Quebec campaign, it is that the incumbent repeatedly stoked fears and prejudices about immigration.
It is hard to see how Poilievre — who needs to make inroads in the diverse suburban ridings of the country in the next election to lead his party to government — could endorse the immigration demands of a Quebec premier who has given the cultural communities of his own province little cause for confidence in his government.
By the same token, Poilievre will also have to decide how close he wants to be to an incoming Alberta premier who is more committed to thumbing her government’s nose at the Constitution and the rule of law than any past Quebec sovereigntist premier.
If the last 40 years have demonstrated anything, it is that many voters, in particular but not exclusively in Ontario, will take a pass on an aspiring prime minister who seems willing to play ball with sovereigntist premiers, be they in Quebec or in Alberta.
It is hard to see how Pierre Poilievre could endorse the demands of an immigrationresistent Quebec premier or how close he wants to be to an incoming Alberta premier committed to thumbing her government’s nose at the Constitution