Twenty years ago this summer the Parliament of Canada took a sharp turn for the worse. It's about time we got our government back on track.
On Aug. 13, 1990, Gilles Duceppe became the first elected Bloc Quebecois member of Parliament, easily winning an east-end Montreal by-election. The "group" -it claimed it wasn't a party -had been founded three weeks earlier when Lucien Bouchard, five other Quebec Conservative MPs and one Liberal declared their allegiance to Quebec, not Canada. It was a spectacular betrayal of Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, or a spectacular affirmation of Quebec identity. Or both.
Twenty years later, the Bloc looks like merely a spectacular and sterile waste, except as a branch plant of the Parti Quebecois and a self-perpetuating pension machine. In the arithmetic of elections, 40 or 50 Bloc seats make a majority government less likely, destabilizing the country and depriving successive Liberal and Conservative governments of caucus and cabinet strength in Quebec.
We regret that so many francophones still believe that "the interests of Quebec" are best represented by this absurdity, a sovereignist party in the federal Parliament. But the Bloc is undeniably deeply rooted. It has never mustered 50 per cent of the vote across the province, but since 1993 its poorest showing has been 38 of Quebec's 75 seats. In the 2008 election, 49 Bloquistes were elected: two-thirds of the seats with 38 per cent of the vote.
When the Bloc was formed, this newspaper said editorially that "it is probably better to have the sovereignty movement represented in Parliament than outside, fomenting a spirit of excluded martyrdom in the streets." That still makes sense; Bloc MPs, freely elected, are as legitimate as any others.
But while the Bloc is a security blanket for francophones wary of English Canada, it is also a fomenter of their fears: In Bloc mythology, Quebec and the rest of Canada have nothing in common, should be separate, can't get along, etc., etc.
When the Bloc was formed, the confident predictions flew: We won't be here long, independence is coming. In 1992 Bouchard promised that the party would disband after a referendum, win or lose. But the lure of sinecure positions, and the chance to help the Parti Quebecois, have proved too powerful to overcome. Twenty years after it blossomed, the BQ is a strongly rooted weed. The challenge for the federal government, and for English Canada, is to help francophones understand how damaging this branch plant really is.