Confused about which provincial political party to vote for? Didn’t think so. Me neither. But you can take this quiz anyway, just for fun.
Not too surprisingly, my result was overwhelmingly for the Liberals (85 points), distantly followed by the ADQ (25 points), the Green Party (11 points), the PQ (8 points) and Quebec Solidaire (0 points). Not exactly shocking news.
Good thing I don’t live in Quebec – since I don’t speak French, I can’t be told what party I should vote for if I did.
It astounds me, as an American, to find out that the Conservatives, despite their levels of success in recent Federal elections, have nothing in Quebec.
Canadian politics is something we just can’t quite grasp down here, it seems.
(I do, however, take the lesson I wish others to take about American politics, and don’t spout off about Canadian politics as such, because I know I don’t know what the heck’s going on!)
Quebec’s rather unique political landscape has meant that, for many years, our political dichotomy hasn’t been the traditional left-right, but rather the federalist-separatist divide. Generally if you wanted Quebec to stay in Canada, you voted Liberal, and if you wanted Quebec to separate you voted PQ, and no other issues ever mattered much in an election campaign.
The ADQ has increased in popularity as a “third option” in the past few years, mostly because people were getting fed up with one-issue electoral campaigns. The ADQ is sort of like our “Conservative” party, in that they’re more right-wing than the Libs or the PQ. But in Quebec, that doesn’t mean very right-wing at all; we’re still a pretty liberal province, on the whole. That, and the fact that the ADQ hasn’t quite decided what it believes, have usually led to poor electoral performance so far.
But Andre Boisclair’s extremely low popularity means that for the first time, “soft nationalists” are flocking away from the PQ and towards other options. For once, we have a campaign not dominated by separatist/federalist. So it’s actually interesting for a change.
Still, ADQ aside, don’t count on a Quebec Conservative Party anytime soon.