Quebec Premier François delivering his victory speech/Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

October 4, 2022

Of all the ways in which there are two kinds of politician — the ones who give democracy a bad name and the ones who don’t; the ones who send out holiday cards starring other people’s pets, etc. etc. — defeat always reveals another important distinction, between those who immediately start whacking the underbrush for scapegoats and those who don’t.

Within that divide is an important sub-split, between politicians who immediately start whacking the underbrush for scapegoats privately and those who do it publicly.

The most memorable instance of the latter in Canadian history was Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau’s speech on October 30^th, 1995, conceding the loss of the province’s second independence referendum to federalist forces by just 54,288 votes — a result begging to be blamed on someone or something, especially after a few fingers of Chivas. Parizeau blamed it, gracelessly, on, “l’argent, puis des votes ethniques” — “money and ethnic votes.”

It was an unfortunate, bitter choice of words from a man who had never quite mastered René Lévesque’s default posture of not letting his ego get in the way of le beau rêve. Parizeau — whose time at the London School of Economics earning a PhD under Nobel laureate James Meade had produced in him an oddbod mix of fervent Anglophilia expressed in Savile Row suits and PG Wodehouse idioms such as “by jove” and “jolly good” and an apparently unconflicted support for Parti Québécois language laws — resigned as premier the next day.

But the comment did capture an element of Quebec nationalism that endures to this day: the tension between the push of a minority-within-a-majority culture accustomed to expending energy on defending its own identity and the pull of inclusion and diversity as both moral imperative and political pragmatism.

As Monday’s Quebec election results underscored, that tension now lives with the Coalition Avenir Québec and its leader, François Legault. The CAQ won a landslide second majority, growing its Assemblée Nationale seat count from 76 of 125 seats at dissolution to 90 at press time — an outcome nearly matching Robert Bourassa’s 92-seat showing in 1989. This victory was achieved despite Legault’s most controversial policies, codified in two laws that relied on the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to abrogate the rights of religious minorities in the case of Bill 21 and of linguistic minorities in the case of Bill 96.

While Legault is frequently compared to longtime, pre-Quiet Revolution premier Maurice Duplessis for his coercive paternalism, he has also displayed a willingness to embrace the most politically impactful aspect of the faux populism of which Donald Trump’s presidency was just one international manifestation — the flouting of longstanding norms associated with rights and democracy, including on immigration.

With the debate over Quebec independence — whether dormant or demised — apparently off the table, the question now is what kind of society does Quebec want to be?

At a time when conservatism is being used worldwide as the most plausible stalking horse for policies that have far more to do with democracy degradation than with ideology, and when new political parties are being used to rationalize radical departures from status quo normalcy, Legault’s electoral success as the leader of a relatively new conservative party isn’t shocking. The fragmentation of his opposition into four parties has produced the sort of power consolidation which, elsewhere, has relied on corruption as a means to that same end. It has also produced a cocktail of grievances about the unfairness of the first-past-the-post system as a reflection of popular will, with gaps between popular support and seat allotment provoking calls for electoral reform that were, not surprisingly, dismissed by Legault on Tuesday.

This election has been described — notably by McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Director Daniel Béland here in Policy — as illustrative of “the demise of the federalist-sovereigntist dichotomy as Quebec’s most defining political cleavage,” based on the eclipsing of both the Quebec Liberal Party and the Parti Québécois by the CAQ. On Monday, Liberal Leader Dominique Anglade held onto official opposition status at 21 seats, all of them on the island of Montreal — down from 31 in 2018 and 27 at dissolution — for the party that has elected 13 premiers since 1878. As Toronto Star columnist and veteran Quebec politics observer Chantal Hébert pointed out on Radio-Canada Monday night, there aren’t too many second majority governments that go as well as first majority governments — a truism that flags the Liberal Party’s opportunity to rebuild.

The PQ, the political party Lévesque founded to mainstream an intra-national independence movement that had previously expressed itself through less democratic means, including the violence of the October Crisis, elected three MNAs Monday. That’s the fewest number of PQ members in the National Assembly since the party first fielded candidates in 1970, winning seven seats.

With the debate over Quebec independence — whether dormant or demised — apparently off the table, the question now is what kind of society does Quebec want to be? Can the French language be protected without fuelling fear for the future of rights and democracy in one of the world’s great cultures? Can the political contagion of division, corruption and propaganda distortion that has besieged democratic jurisdictions from Brazil to Italy to the United States be eschewed for a brand of politics that transcends the current commodification of hostility to amplify Quebec’s 21^st-century strengths?

In 2021, for the first time, more Ontarians moved to Quebec than the other way around. Not for the first time since the reverse exodus that began with the first PQ government in 1976 — for the first time, ever. The way to encourage those people and any other Quebecers to speak French is not to make them defensive in the face of your own politicized defensiveness — to treat them as threats that the language needs protection from — but to make it as simple for them as possible to learn one of the world’s most beautiful languages. Promotion as protection. Whether the Supreme Court of Canada ultimately compels such a Plan B or not, it’s a far more sophisticated, sustainable approach.

On Monday night, Legault’s victory speech included reassuringly unifying sentiments, as victory speeches tend to, and a vow that he would be premier “de tous les Québécois”. As a political leader in a global village currently coping with a surplus of village-idiot leaders, he might also vow to represent the best qualities of a province with no shortage of excellent qualities. Ce n’est pas pour rien qu’on l’appelle la belle province.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen served in the Montreal and Ottawa bureaus of Maclean’s, as Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, as international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.