Quebec election tales

Editorial

One of the joys of election nights is the occasional squirming on live television by pundits who failed to predict potential outcomes. At one point during Monday's coverage of the Quebec provincial election, when it appeared that the come-from-nowhere one-man-show Mario Dumont was about to win a minority government, pundits acknowledged this wasn't a possibility anybody had foreseen.

Why not, one might reasonably ask. Polls had said for weeks this was a three-way race and any one of the three parties could surge at the last minute to victory.

As it turned out, Premier Jean Charest's Liberals managed to squeak past Dumont's Action Democratique du Quebec, which will serve as official opposition. The Parti Quebecois came third.

Is separatism dead, as Pierre Trudeau famously and prematurely once declared? No. This election was about more than separation. Indeed, separation remains more popular than the PQ, its main champion. The PQ leader, Andre Boisclair, did not succeed in capturing Quebeckers' imaginations for a variety of reasons.

Charest, the incumbent Liberal premier, had been wildly unpopular through most of his term and called this election during a blip, when it appeared he might win another majority. It was not to be.

Charest, for his part, inexplicably failed in an old Quebec specialty - vote-buying. Given a windfall in the recent federal budget, the premier undermined his own economic position by promising to roll over the feds' correction to the fiscal imbalance into a tax cut for Quebeckers. Everyone loves a tax cut, but the overarching economic issue for Quebeckers, among other Canadians, for the past several years, has been the fiscal imbalance – the perception that the federal government was wallowing in surpluses while provincial governments, which had suffered downloading under successive Paul Martin budgets, were struggling to balance their budgets. A tax cut is a fair proposition – after all, some provinces raised taxes to compensate for federal funding losses – but is a tax cut what Charest had been fighting for all along? And, if so, why did he wait until mere days before a close election to say so? It smelled off.

Meanwhile, Boisclair will almost certainly be eaten by his party, which does not suffer losers gladly.

And, though many see this election as a watershed that could break the federalist-separatist polarity in the province, it is less revolutionary than it appears. Dumont's ambiguity – he refused to say if he is a federalist and mused about ideas akin to "sovereignty association" – is as old as Quebec politics itself. Indeed, until the PQ burst onto the scene in the 1970s, Quebec politics, under both Liberal and Union Nationale premiers, was all about the ambiguity of federalism. Maurice Duplessis, the Union Nationale titan, and Jean Lesage, the Liberal father of the Quiet Revolution, played both sides of the federalist-nationalist equation to their benefit. Dumont is less a fresh face of Quebec politics than a return to the pre-polarization of the 1950s.

On top of all this, Dumont's ascent seems to indicate a return to another time as well. The issue of "reasonable accommodation" played a not-insignificant role in this election. At one point, an issue arose over youth amateur sport players wearing hijabs, the head scarf commonly worn by observant Muslim girls and women. Dumont charged in with little discretion, as did Charest, displaying a willingness to exploit social division for political advantage – both endorsed the referee's decision that hijabs shouldn't be worn when playing sports. In the aftermath of another incident, in which a small Quebec town passed bylaws that could reasonably be dubbed overkill by banning wife-burning and stoning, the matter of reasonable accommodation and tolerance appears to be boiling to the surface in Quebec. Finally, conflicting decisions were made over whether Quebeckers needed to show their faces in order to vote on Monday. Again, this issue goes to the heart of Muslim traditions. And, as we noted in these pages recently, anything that upsets the multicultural fabric of Canadians is not likely to be good news for Jews.

When all is said and done, much will be said and perhaps little done. This is typical of minority governments. But Quebec has taken a sharp turn. Some would say to the right. Some might argue against the status quo. Regardless, as this strange new mélange of parties convenes to govern Quebec for as long as this National Assembly survives, we can depend on Quebec politics to be as entertaining as ever.

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