Three short weeks ago, the provincial-election campaign started out with the Liberal government facing a corruption scandal, an army of marching students and accusations that it was worn out after three terms in power.
For Quebec’s opposition parties, the Sept. 4 election call must have seemed like a gift.
For the electorate, it seemed like the campaign would be a place for those issues that had so recently been so pressing — corruption at various levels of government, whether tuition fees should be raised, and whether it was time for a change in provincial leadership — to be widely debated.
Something seems to have happened in the intervening days and weeks, however. Suddenly tuition fees seem to be a long way from the front of anyone’s mind (save perhaps the leaders of the rapidly dwindling student protest movement). Even the issue of corruption has faded considerably from public and political discourse despite the splashy arrival on the campaign scene of corruption-fighter Jacques Duchesneau as a Coalition Avenir Québec candidate.
Suddenly what seems to be on the minds of everyone in Quebec is an old issue: the threat (or hope, depending on how you look at it) of sovereignty, and of a third referendum on same.
Those who thought other, newer issues would dominate the campaign reckoned without Pauline Marois. The Parti Québécois leader has single-handedly embroiled this province in heated debates on cultural identity, on whether Christianity should enjoy unique rights over other faiths in the province — and on holding a referendum on independence.
This has rattled many Quebecers. Cocktail-party and golf-game conversations are rife with talk of what a win by a PQ in full sovereignty-at-all-costs mode will do to the value of their homes, their pensions, their investment portfolios. One hears whispers of a new exodus from the province; there are many who stayed and stood their ground through the economic and political uncertainties brought on by previous PQ administrations, but who say they’re not sure they have the stomach for yet another go-round.
And it’s not just referendum talk that is worrying many Quebecers. The xenophobic tone of too many of Marois’s recent pronouncements paints a picture of an insular, closed-minded Quebec that many do not recognize as the place they have chosen to live.
As the public focus intensifies on these divisive issues, the Parti Québécois may well be in the process of throwing away the large and seemingly insurmountable lead that polls showed it had over the Liberals and the CAQ at the outset of the campaign. The PQ may well lose the backing of “soft” nationalists, and its traditional supporters whose main interest is in social programs, environmental protection and the like might be tempted by the relatively new left-wing Québec solidaire.
If it loses the support it enjoyed when the election was called, the PQ has only itself to blame. Marois refuses to make clear whether she believes an electoral victory allows her to proceed swiftly with a third referendum, with or without the permission slip provided by a “popular-initiative” petition. That’s a big question to leave hanging. Voters want to know what the PQ would do if elected.
And they need to know who would be welcome in a PQ-run state, though at the moment the answer seems only too clear. With each passing day, Marois adds insult to injury when she reaffirms that in her Quebec there is one religion and one language. Despite the outrage from many quarters that greeted her earlier pronouncements on instituting a “charter of secularism” (which would notably ban the wearing of religious symbols, except for Christian ones, by public-service employees), Marois is continuing to adopt a tone of intolerance when it comes to cultural diversity. Late this week she told a Quebec City audience, “In our house, my friends, we will talk French in every room,” and “Our grandfathers and grandmothers put crucifixes in our house and we are going to leave them there.”
It is not a bad thing that the independence question has become a major — quite possibly the major — issue for Quebec’s voters. There is a certain clarity that comes along with that.
This does not mean that voters who don’t want the economic and political instability that a push toward sovereignty would inevitably entail should stop thinking about the other issues. Those other issues — the economy, health care, corruption, and yes, tuition fees — are important, and need to be addressed.
But what all voters in this province should do is think long and hard about whether the picture that Pauline Marois is drawing for us of her independent Quebec resembles a place they would want to live. If not, all Quebecers have the opportunity to send her a message on election day.