Perhaps the Quebec voters are just tired of the old parties. It is too bad that does not happen more federally although the Green party is gaining significantly. The NDP does not seem to be in a "surge". Monday should be an interesting election night in Quebec!
Changing landscape
Mar 24, 2007 04:30 AM
Chantal Hebert
Monday's Quebec election is really the second phase in a dramatic shift in the political tectonic plates of the province that first came to notice in last year's federal vote.
The polarization between sovereignists and federalists that for so long shaped the Quebec landscape is no longer the defining feature of the province's politics.
On the left and the right, the issue of Quebec's future has ceased to command the first loyalties of thousands of voters. They are engaging in the electoral process on different terms.
The result is a landscape in great flux, that will continue to change over the course of the next set of federal and Quebec elections.
From that angle, the surge of the Action démocratique du Québec party during the past month is totally in sync with the logic of the last federal vote and the 10 unexpected Quebec seats that landed in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's lap on election night Jan. 23, 2006.
It has never been more obvious that the 2006Conservative advance was not a fluke than at the end of this topsy-turvy Quebec campaign. Harper's surprising score – one in four votes – was a symptom of a larger phenomenon that has now thrown all the traditional Quebec equations on their heads and replaced them with this weekend's uncertain numbers.
Just as Paul Martin and Gilles Duceppe did not anticipate the Conservative breakthrough last year, the Quebec Liberals and the Parti Québécois have spent the past four weeks at a loss to stem ADQ Leader Mario Dumont's momentum.
Indeed, Jean Charest and André Boisclair's efforts to rally their troops under the black-and-white flags of federalism and sovereignty have mainly resulted in sending more voters to the grey zone of the autonomous ADQ.
These efforts have so spectacularly backfired that the unity issue has virtually disappeared from the radar of the last stretch of the campaign, another first of sorts for a Quebec election.
According to the last CROP poll of the campaign, the result of their common failure to polarize the election along familiar lines will likely be the first minority government in modern Quebec history.
While Liberal leader Charest is entering the last weekend of the campaign with a nominal six-point lead overall, he is still running third with francophone voters. As in 1998, he could once again win the popular vote and lose the election.
At 34 per cent, 28 per cent and 25 per cent, the Liberals, PQ and ADQ, respectively, are also all significantly below the bar of a majority government. With numbers like those, it could take a while to determine who has secured the job of governing Quebec on Monday.
Dumont could even end up having the last word on which of his two opponents becomes the next premier. A mere 48 hours to the vote, he is poised to emerge as the power-broker in a reconfigured National Assembly.
After more than a decade of largely solitary efforts, the ADQ leader is expected to command a significant caucus for the first time in the wake of Monday's vote. As of then, his party would be a magnet for the talent and money that were in such short supply in its campaign this year.
Alone among the three leaders campaigning in this election, Dumont is virtually certain to be around to fight the next one.
Depending on the outcome on Monday, the days of at least one of his two main rivals could be numbered.
In what seems to have become a best-case scenario for his Liberals, Charest may yet squeak back to power but almost certainly without a majority.
He will also return to the National Assembly diminished in more than the number of members at his command.
Earlier this week, Charest expended a chunk of his national capital on trying to turn the tide of the election in his favour.
For almost a decade, he had been making the case for a better fiscal deal for Quebec, arguing that while surpluses were piling up on Parliament Hill, the bills for maintaining a solid social safety net were piling up in Quebec City.
Harper's budget went a long way to vindicate that position. Of all provinces, Quebec secured the sweetest deal on equalization last Monday.
But by pulling the rabbit of an income tax cut out of the hat of the federal budget, Charest has undermined his own rationale. The predictable reaction outside Quebec was a nascent backlash against a federal budget that seemed designed to allow the Quebec Liberal leader to buy his way back into power with equalization money.
Meanwhile in Quebec, the reaction to the sudden prospect of a Liberal tax cut was confusion rather than celebration.
If he comes in a close second behind Boisclair and the PQ on Monday night, Charest could hang on to power and try to strike a deal with Dumont, to pre-empt a PQ minority government.
There is no doubt that sovereignist voters would react with fury, but such an arrangement would at least spare the PQ the pain of spending another mandate failing to bring about a winning referendum.
If it manages to avoid a historical defeat and to crawl across the finish line in first place, it will largely be because of a combination of the efforts of former premier Jacques Parizeau and a favourable split in the votes resulting from the stronger ADQ presence rather than as the result of a surge in sovereignist fervour.
More so than any other sovereignist figure, Parizeau has carried Boisclair on his shoulders over the past month, tirelessly striving to bridge the gap between the PQ's disengaged traditional nationalist base and its rookie, urban leadership.
But even Parizeau cannot turn water into wine.
If the Quebec campaign had been a referendum on a referendum, the verdict would already be in. There is no impetus for a replay of the 1995 cliff-hanger vote on Quebec's political future. On the contrary, the belief that the chances for another referendum are remote has facilitated the exodus of federalist voters unhappy with Charest's first mandate to the ADQ.
Ironically, if the PQ ends up with the largest number of seats Monday night, it would do so with one of its lowest scores ever and only because so many Quebecers are convinced that in its old age, the party has become a toothless tiger.
Even the arts community, the very soul of the sovereignty movement, is branching out of the battle. In this campaign, many of its members lined up behind Quebec Solidaire, the province's fledging left-wing party.
If the PQ is returned to opposition on Monday, the search for a replacement will start on the morning after the election. But the party lacks a unifying figure. It does not have a leader of the stature of Lucien Bouchard, René Lévesque or Parizeau waiting in the wings.
The name most often mentioned to replace Boisclair is that of Gilles Duceppe. But in his role as Bloc leader – a position that involves never having to force an unpopular decision on a reluctant public – he, too, has been losing his Quebec audience, to the Conservatives but also to Stéphane Dion's Liberals and to the Green party.
One way or another, it looks like there will be no real closure for anyone on Monday. The next act in this saga will take place on the stage of the next federal election.
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