Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois gamely shrugged off a poll taken two days into her party's latest internal convulsion as just one poll taken in the heat of a tense situation.
Conducted by the reputable CROP firm, it showed the PQ trailing the Liberals in popularity for the first time in more than a year, and that close to two-thirds of Quebecers, including a majority of PQ voters, think she should quit as party leader.
Marois did have a certain point. In politics a single poll doesn't make for a definitive trend, and this one, which had the Liberals ahead by only one percentage point, was an Internet poll with an indeterminate margin of error. More telling, though, was the finding that three out of five Quebecers are against the PQ bill that would have overridden any legal challenge to the backroom deal between Quebecor and Quebec City's mayor for naming and management rights to the projected new arena in the provincial capital.
Four high-profile PQ MNAs have so far quit Marois's caucus, in part because they object to the bill - for which they had been ordered by the leader to vote en bloc - on ethical grounds, in that the legislation would deprive citizens of the right to challenge a measure of dubious legality. But an underlying factor was impatience with Marois's cautious policy on advancing the sovereignist cause without a commitment to a referendum should the PQ take power after the next election.
That scenario appeared likely for the longest time as Jean Charest and his Liberal government plumbed record lows of unpopularity. But this outbreak of PQ infighting should be an occasion for Quebecers to take a long hard look at the PQ and ask themselves if, for all the sins of the Liberals and given the problems facing the province, they seriously want this schizoid bunch in government.
Since its founding the PQ has been the most undisciplined of Canadian political parties. It is an ideological party in that it united behind the ideal of Quebec independence. But it is also a coalition of leftists and small-c conservatives, of separatist hardliners resolved to push for independence at all cost and moderate nationalists prepared to settle for running the government until such time as an easy path to sovereignty opens up.
What we have, then, in today's PQ are two factions. One is so hungry for power that it is prepared to trash the principles of probity on which it claims to stand, by finessing the possibly dirty arena deal to boost its electoral prospects in the provincial capital region. Another is obsessed not with governing Quebec in its present state, but governing a state of Quebec that exists only in their imagination.
Another finding of this week's poll that rings true is that what Quebecers want above all is good government, not the pursuit of a political fantasy or the disruption that would be caused by another referendum. That's what 82 per cent of CROP's respondents said. Good government in this province means dealing with a sagging justice system, an underperforming health-care system, corruption in the construction industry and municipal governance, and a school system with an alarming dropout rate.
All of these fall under present provincial jurisdiction, and separation from Canada, the PQ's avowed principal goal, would not make it easier to resolve any of them. If anything it would make it harder, given the extensive disruptions separation would involve, along with the elimination of fiscal subsidies from the rest of Canada.
The federal election showed that Quebecers are tired of the same old, which is what the PQ has become, along with the Liberals. As such, the moment is at hand for François Legault and his coalition of thinkers to swing into action and form a serious party with pertinent and coherent policies in time to fight the next provincial election.