War-gaming a PQ government in Quebec
That’s the subject of Paul Wells’s latest.
Stephen Harper doesn’t announce many of his most important meetings. He routinely meets one-on-one with provincial premiers without either party mentioning the encounters to reporters. And from Stephanie Levitz at Canadian Press comes news that he met Brian Mulroney and, separately, Jean Charest last week. …
Harper’s tiny Quebec caucus makes as many brave noises as it can, but I know the prime minister is spooked by the prospect (not the guarantee, because of course there is none, but the non-negligible possibility) of a Parti Québécois government returning to power within 15 weeks.
Various branches of the federal government have quietly been discussing possible responses to a PQ victory. During the recent French election, one of Harper’s main concerns was PQ claims that François Hollande would rekindle a cozy relationship between French Socialists and Quebec separatists. (Polarity on that file has switched a few times over the years. De Gaulle was no Socialist and François Mitterrand, who was, was no fan of the PQ. But Jacques Chirac astonished everyone by becoming a good friend of Jean Chrétien’s, and Nicolas Sarkozy was so tight with the Desmarais clan that the PQ is coming off the chilliest five years it’s ever known in France. So the PQ has been hoping a Hollande victory would bring a thaw.) I’m told Harper was greatly reassured by his first long conversation with Hollande, at Camp David last month. But France’s attitude was always going to be peripheral. Hollande doesn’t get a vote. …
As for Harper: try this thought experiment. Imagine Albertans taking it into their heads to do something, and Tom Mulcair trying to talk them out of it. That’s a decent proxy for Harper’s clout in Quebec: the NDP share of the popular vote in Alberta last May and the Conservatives’ in Quebec were nearly the same.
So if Pauline Marois became premier and decided to try her luck, she’d face a worn-out Jean Charest with no young Jean Charest to back him up; and a Prime Minister with half the seats and voter appeal that Jean Chrétien had when he nearly lost the 1995 referendum. What’s that leave?
Why, Tom Mulcair. By some measures, the most popular politician in Quebec. A few New Democrats were already crowing Friday evening on Twitter at the prospect of Mulcair emerging as Captain Canada in some new confrontation. And that would indeed be fun. But early on, his stance on the Clarity Act and the NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration would get noticed by the 64% of 2011 NDP voters who live outside Quebec. … Mulcair … would watch his party snap like a twig. …
[If Marois] wins an election and then gets bold or reckless, Harper won’t have much of a political hand. He will have the Clarity Act, the Constitution and customary international law, all of which break decidedly in favour of a united Canada. But those are all handy guides for steering through a hell of a political mess. Once you need them, you’re already in the mess. No wonder Harper is renewing strategic acquaintances.
Interesting times.
I say this: for all the complaining one hears, French is very well protected and, that being so, Quebeckers like being in Canada.
The only way that province is leaving is if the rest of the country gets together and holds a referendum on kicking them out.
The Conservatives DO need to buck up in Quebec, but that’s because a second majority is hard at the current levels of Quebec support. It took winning the rest of Canada in a Mulroney 1984 fashion to get the first one, and you can’t count on that particular bolt of lightning striking twice.
Update: Other comment — all these regionalist bleats are paper tigers. Same goes for “Western alienation”.
Now that they’ve seen that (1) there can be a Western Canada-based leader and party elected to government, and (2) the piece-meal dismantling of traditional Canadian symbols that they disliked has been pushed back against (hello, Royal Canadian Air Force!), there really aren’t that many real complaints.
Yes, there are bad policies — equalization, for one. But those are best dealt with through the political process.
“I say this: for all the complaining one hears, French is very well protected and, that being so, Quebeckers like being in Canada.”
Tiger, with respect, I have to assume that you don’t spend much time in Quebec, if this is your assessment of the Quebec public’s sentiment. As someone who lives in the province, I would hazard that the sort of policy horse-trading you’re counting on could not be further from the minds of the Quebecois, by and large.
While Quebec’s nationalist population (very broadly defined here) might well be interested in the status of French in Canada, the issue is largely incidental to any aspirations towards statehood. For most of those here who support Quebec’s separation, at least in my experience, national status is an end in and of itself, rather than the means to accomplish a set of policy outcomes. In 1995, Chretien began the campaign by making all sorts of economic arguments to Quebeckers about the infeasibility of independence (the loss of equalization, the loss of currency union, etc.), and on the strength of these arguments he quickly plunged into dangerous territory. The campaign was only turned around when economics were abandoned in favour of a more emotive, sub-rational campaign (that is, one based on appeals to group attachment, large demonstrations of Canadians’ love for Quebec, etc.).
Consider the spat over the “arts cuts” that cost Harper support throughout Montreal in 2008. The issue was nonsensical – cuts to agencies that promote the arts, rather than cuts to artists’ own funding (for the most part) – but it managed to shift the Quebec vote decisively, precisely because it was taken as indicative of an incompatibility between the cultural identity of the conservatives and those of the “people of Quebec”.
The attitude to national identity here is something that is very difficult to express or comprehend for those not intimately familiar with the futility of arguing with its proponents. Nationalism may have been parlayed into policy horse-trading by successive parties in Ottawa over the years, but that isn’t the lens through which people on the street, in the terraces, etc., see it.
Wells is right to be concerned, and Harper is right to begin planning now. If Charest doesn’t at least manage to hold onto a minority position, this situation is going to become highly problematic for Canadians generally.
Not buying it.
They’ve had forty years to leave, and they haven’t left yet.
Conclusion? They’re not leaving.
It makes sense for the PM to chat with Mulroney and Charest, and to make sure those meetings “accidentally” leak — have to rebuild the old Blue machine. But not because the country is somehow going to die if he doesn’t.