Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘pauline marois’

The sudden defection of four high-profile Parti Quebecois MNAs, including Louise Beaudoin, has everyone asking questions, and has Pauline Marois scrambling to defend her leadership of a party that can only be characterized as being in the midst of a full-scale crisis.

And everyone is asking, what the hell happened? How could a party that had a commanding lead in the polls, whose leader won a 93% confidence vote less than two months ago, and who most pundits predicted had a virtual lock on winning the next provincial election, be self-destructing like this?

The ostensible catalyst – a vote on a private member’s bill that would have guaranteed naming rights for a new arena in a bid to attract an NHL team back to Quebec City – was merely the trigger; the ingredients of this turmoil have been marinating much longer than that. That vote has been shelved now anyway, though it’s entirely beside the point.

So what happened in a mere two months?

Well, the NDP happened, for one thing. The media wanted to claim that the Layton sweep of Quebec – and the Bloc Quebecois self-destruction that accompanied it – meant that Quebecers had moved past sovereignty, and were embracing their role as part of a united Canada. Bloggers claimed that sovereignty is dead in Quebec.

Those of us who live here know different. We know that the NDP win here, coupled with the Tory win just about everywhere else, actually led to an increase in support for sovereignty in the aftermath of an election that made us feel more alienated from the rest of Canada than ever.

And the defecting MNAs from the PQ know it too. They see the tide turning, and they’re getting impatient. They’re pushing for a sea change. No more “winning conditions”, no more of Marois’s strategy – so eagerly backed just two short months ago – of putting referendum timing on the back burner and concentrating on winning elections and on governing. They don’t want to govern a province; they want a country. And they feel like fifteen years since the squeaker referendum of 1995 is fifteen years too many.

This position is being made clear by Jean-Martin Aussant, the fourth PQ member to defect and the most openly blunt about his reasons:

“I’m here to work on sovereignty. And I don’t think she’s the one Quebecers will want to follow, at a very high rate, towards sovereignty,” Aussant told a news conference.

“That’s a very cruel statement. It’s a hard one to say. It’s probably a hard one to hear, from them, but that’s what I think.”

And now former Premier Bernard Landry is speaking out, too:

Landry says the PQ has become too complacent and its members, who want a more strident pursuit of the party’s raison d’etre, are now pushing back.

“There are other things (causing this),” Landry told Radio-Canada on Tuesday. He said the pursuit of power should take a back seat to principles — like the quest for independence.

Such a move would represent a strategic shift for a party which, for more than 15 years, has placed its emphasis on governing or winning government — and has simply expressed its hope to hold a vote on independence eventually, whenever the conditions are right.

“Rene Levesque did not found this party to govern the province of Quebec,” Landry said Tuesday. “The obsession should be public service — not taking power. It’s better to take power later — but to take it with dignity.”

The Pequistes who are dialing up the sovereignty-now talk aren’t doing so off the cuff. They’re seeing the same things we are; hearing the same conversations, feeling the same winds in the air. They’re seeing how Stephen Harper in power and Jack Layton in opposition is making many Quebec soft nationalists re-evaluate just how Canadian they feel after all. And they feel like it’s time to strike while the iron is hot.

On the surface, the self-destruction of one sovereignty party and the turmoil of the other would be good news for federalism. Under the surface, it’s anything but.

The election that wasn’t supposed to matter, everyone said. A snoozer. A mere footnote in the headlines. Most people in Quebec slept through it. But surprisingly, it may end up mattering more than people think. Here are a few reasons why:

• A slim Liberal majority: Much slimmer than anyone, including Charest, was predicting. He’ll have to work hard to win his votes in the National Assembly. Any resignations, by-elections or MP absences could be costly.More importantly, the Liberals had been predicted to win seventy-something seats, not the sixty-six they ended up with. So this is a disappointment for Charest, who, even though he got his majority, has to contend with the fact that he dropped in support over the last few days of the campaign. Most of the people voting Liberal did it holding their noses, anyway; Charest’s not particularly loved, he’s just seen as the best-of-the-worst right now. Majority or not, Charest will have to tread very carefully.

• Marois’s bait-and-switch: I’m referring to the S-word, of course. Sovereignty. A word that was scarcely mentioned by the PQ during the campaign, but was the main theme of Marois’s speech last night.Most of the people who voted PQ yesterday do not necessarily want Quebec to separate. I’d venture to say, most of them don’t want it. They voted PQ because they were disillusioned Adequistes, or because they don’t like Charest, or because they felt that the PQ should be in opposition again, or for a variety of reasons.But Marois is neatly implying that, with 51 seats won, she now has a mandate to work towards sovereignty. And it’s hard to argue with her rhetoric, because, after all, downplaying the S-word during a campaign isn’t the same as disavowing it. Marois’s argument is that the PQ has always had sovereignty as its raison d’être (true) and that people voting for them are doing so knowing that, so they’re justified in their claim that the PQ’s rise in fortune during this election implies a rise in support for sovereignty.Of course, Stephen Harper helped her here a lot, by voluntarily demonizing himself as Monsieur anti-Quebec last week. Harper’s rhetoric not only helped the PQ jump in the polls and capture more seats than predicted; it also gave the PQ an excuse to start beating the sovereigntist drums again.And what better time to do so than during an opposition period? Marois knows she has about three or four years, at least, to hammer sovereignty at every turn. And as long as Harper is in office federally, she’ll have lots of help. No wonder her speech last night sounded more like a victory speech than Charest’s did.

• Back to the future: The 2007 election was hailed as a landmark, “breakthrough” election for Quebec. The ADQ won official opposition status, the PQ was seen as increasingly irrelevant, and we were finally going to get a “normal”, left-right political spectrum where we were talking about actual issues, you know, like education and healthcare and silly things like that. Single-issue voting along strictly federalist-separatist lines? Nah, we were past that. We were evolved.So much for that.The rightist ADQ, which was so fond of fence-sitting on the nationalist question while insisting that Quebecois were past it, has disintegrated in this election. Seems we’re not past it after all. Now, we’re back to a two-party, Liberal-PQ, federalist-sovereigntist divide. Never mind that most of those voting PQ were not voting for separation; it’s the spin that will matter now, and the spin doctors are hard at work convincing everyone that this is exactly what it means. And so, we regress into old patterns, and the issues can be damned.

• Voter apathy: As predicted, the election had the worst turnout in Quebec’s history with only 57% of people in the province bothering to cast a vote. That would mean that there were more people who stayed home (43%) than people who voted for the winning party (42% of those who voted). Again, it’s not too surprising; people are fed up with elections, felt this one was superfluous and unnecessary; were distracted by the goings-on in Ottawa; were just too cold to go to the polling stations. Whatever. But it means that all the political leaders are going to have to do some serious thinking about how to get the public engaged in politics again. Conventional wisdom holds that lower voter turnouts are better for the Liberals, and higher turnouts favour the PQ, which doesn’t say much for Charest’s claim of a strong governing mandate. Apathy is always bad for democracy.

• The rise of Québec Solidaire: Amir Khadir’s election in Mercier means that the far-left QS now has representation in the National Assembly. So we’ve gone from right-middle-left to left-lefter-leftest. Kind of like a university campus political spectrum, really. And so appropriate for Quebec. For those who think it’s just a blip, remember that the ADQ also started with only one MNA – Mario Dumont. Will the Québec Solidaire be the next third party to rise and fall? Stay tuned.

• The federal implications: And this one’s the biggie. Quebec’s election will matter not only to Quebecers, but to all Canadians. With Ottawa in crisis, yesterday’s election may have a big impact on how things shake out over the next few weeks until Parliament resumes in January. The unity question is suddenly an issue again (thanks a whole lot, Stephen) and that’s going to influence how people view the Liberal leadership question, the coalition question, and the potential results of a possible federal election, should the government fall. It’s something that all the federal leaders are thinking about very carefully.

So, the election may end up mattering a great deal. Those of you who were among the 43% of eligible Quebec voters who stayed home yesterday might want to reflect on that.

This might be one of the shortest minority governments on record, if Charest’s budget gets defeated on June 1st, as expected given the PQ and the ADQs opposition to it. We could have new elections as early as July.

The irony is that, for the most part, I actually think the budget presented by the Liberals was good. I don’t often say that about budgets. But Charest’s team had the right priorities here: Lowering taxes to reduce our overly outrageous tax burden, increasing funding for healthcare and education, ending the crippling handcuffs on universities by lifting the tuition freeze gradually while supplementing with additional loans and bursaries, and additional investment in city infrastructure, while cutting spending in a whole host of other areas.

Sure, the budget’s not without its problems. But the ADQ and the PQ have both put themselves in the position now of toppling a government to force an election because they oppose tax cuts. Where else in the world could political parties believe that this would earn them votes in a subsequent election?

Unfortunately, in Quebec’s political climate, this has a fair shot of working. Which is, in a nutshell, exactly what’s wrong with our society. People want more spending and they will pay more taxes for it, and when they complain about the taxes, the politicians can just point to Ottawa and blame the “evil Federal government” for creating the “fiscal imbalance” (you know, the one that Jean Charest took credit for solving right before the last election).

If the ADQ and the PQ both make good on their threats to bring down this government by voting against the budget, then Charest’s political career will be over. Marois’s election coronation as PQ leader will be fast-tracked, and Dumont will humbly refuse to try to form an opposition government, even though he might be asked to do so, because it would be bad form. And one of the two will probably get elected.

Shame. Just when I was starting to think that this Liberal/ADQ minority government was actually working surprisingly well.

Our likely next Premier of Quebec is 39-year-old Andre Boisclair, who beat out rivals including Pauline Marois for the leadership of the Parti Quebecois, despite the media attention given to his past cocaine use:

Boisclair faces high expectations. Charest has been stuck at staggering levels of unpopularity since shortly after coming to power in 2003. The PQ expects to beat the Liberals and snap Quebec’s 35-year tradition of electing governments to two terms.

Considered a relatively soft sovereigntist and a right-winger in a party of progressives, Boisclair must unite a party whose hawkish elements have taken down Bernard Landry, Bouchard and even Rene Levesque for showing hesitation on independence.

This isn’t good news for federalists. Boisclair, despite his battle to get elected, is just the kind of young, charismatic leader that can recruite “soft nationalists” and increase support for sovereignty. It will remain to be seen what changes he brings to the PQ platform, but one thing’s for sure: he has an excellent chance of steamrolling to victory in the next provincial election.

The Parti Quebecois leadership race is garnering surprisingly little media attention, considering that whoever wins is almost certain to be our next premier – Charest’s numbers are in the toilet and another long season of union striking is set to begin – and this person has a fair shot at leading the Yes side of a subsequent referendum to victory. Even the news that a candidate was arrested for drunk driving and may drop out of the race barely registers an eyeblink.

Why? Simple. None of the candidates for PQ leader has any more personality than a toadstool.

Andre Boisclair? Pauline Marois? Louis Bernard? These people make Bernard Landry look like Lucien Bouchard.

The “old guard” PQ has been said to be making its last-ditch stand for years now. But instead of new ideas and dynamic energy, all we’re seeing are the same hard-line policy proposals, anti-English rhetoric, choruses of “Blame Canada”, and tired leftist slogans from the same group of PQ leaders.

Of course, people will probably pay more attention as the November 15th vote approaches. But to most Quebecers – especially those on the other side – the leadership race is a bunch of same old, same old.

The PQ leadership race is shaping up to be interesting. Pauline Marois has already announced her candidacy and Francois Legault is expected to follow. But if Gilles Duceppe throws his hat into the ring, he’s almost certain to sweep the contest.

Unfortunately, the PQ old guard is determined to take the party down the old familiar road again:

Outgoing party vice-president Marie Malavoy warned that the leadership candidates must embrace the party program adopted yesterday, one that was largely influenced by Mr. Landry.

The program, which calls for a referendum on sovereignty “as soon as possible” should the PQ form the next government, reflected Mr. Landry’s approach. Party hard-liners failed in their bid to adopt a more radical program, and say they will now use the leadership race to influence candidates to ensure that whoever becomes party leader will be committed to governing Quebec as though it were a country, with the determination to achieve Quebec independence.

If this is indeed the “old guard’s last stand”, we can expect a full guns blazing sovereignty campaign to kick off right about now. The next election may be a couple of years away, but that just gives the PQ more time to rally support for separation. And with the federalist camp in shambles, it’s gonna be a *long* few years.

Update: Right on cue, Duceppe now says he’s considering running for the job. This is all for show; he wouldn’t have announced that if he hadn’t decided to run. Prepare for Premier Duceppe by 2008. *Sigh*…