Robert Borden, Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper each formed majority governments despite weak showings in Quebec. With the federal Conservatives and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, both polling poorly in the province despite broad support in the rest of Canada, the next federal election is shaping up to be another of those rare events: ’le sweep sans Québec.’PHOTOS: LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES OF CANADA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL/THE CANADIAN PRESS
In the election of 1958, the Conservatives under John Diefenbaker swept the country, winning 208 out of a total of 265 seats – with the help of an astonishing 50 seats in Quebec. In 1984, the Conservatives again swept the country, this time under Brian Mulroney. They won 211 seats – including 58 in Quebec.
On current form, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are headed for a victory of similarly epic proportions – outside of Quebec. According to the projections the Tories could take as much as 80 per cent of the seats in the rest of Canada, more than 200 in all. In Quebec, they are projected to do rather less well: a dozen seats, give or take a couple.
Are we ready for the fallout from such a split result? Is Mr. Poilievre?
It is rare for a party to win a majority without carrying the province of Quebec: It has happened just eight times in our history. Supermajorities without Quebec are even rarer. Of the 14 governments to win an election with 60 per cent or more of the seats, only two did so without also winning a majority of the seats in Quebec.
This election is nevertheless shaping up to be another of those rare events: le sweep sans Québec. The split is exaggerated by first past the post, but not by much. The Conservatives are at roughly 50 per cent in the polls on average across the rest of Canada, but just 22 per cent in Quebec. Mr. Poilievre is even less popular in the province.
The optics of this, needless to say, are not great for national unity: the hot favourite of English Canada, coldly repudiated by Quebec. One searches for comforting precedents. In 2011, for example: Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a majority nationwide, but just five seats in Quebec. No great calamity ensued. Maybe none will again.
But the circumstances were very different then. The province might not have warmed to the Conservatives, but it still gave the vast majority of its seats to a federalist party, thanks to the NDP’s “Orange Wave.” The Bloc Québécois actually won fewer seats than the Tories.
This time around the Bloc is likely to return as the largest party in Quebec, both in seats and as a share of the popular vote: the first time that has happened since 2008. Some projections have them winning 45 seats or more.
So it’s not only a matter of a government winning most of the seats outside Quebec but very few seats inside the province – there is also the likelihood of a separatist party winning most of the seats in Quebec.
I hear you. That’s happened before, too: in 1993, famous as the election in which the Conservatives were reduced to two seats. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals won 177 seats that year, but just 19 in Quebec. The newly formed Bloc won 54 seats, enough to become Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. And you’re right. We survived – barely, but we survived.
Again, however, there was one crucial difference between then and now. The prime minister in those fraught years was a francophone Quebecker, a veteran of the province’s tumultuous politics, at the head of a party with deep Quebec roots. This was of immense help in defeating the separatists in the 1995 referendum, and in subsequent efforts, notably the Clarity Act, to return the tiger to its cage.
This time the country will not have that advantage. Instead we will have an anglophone prime minister (notwithstanding his French name, or his acquisition of the language as an adult) from outside the province, heading a party that has historically struggled in Quebec. (How much has it struggled? Since 1882, through 39 elections, the Conservatives have carried the province just three times.)
The precedent here is less comforting: 1917, the conscription election. That year Robert Borden’s Conservatives won an unparalleled 150 of the 170 seats outside Quebec – to just three inside the province. But again, you say: The worst did not happen.
Only there was no separatist party in those days: neither federally nor provincially. This time – again if current trends hold – the province will return a majority for the Bloc in next year’s federal election, and at least a minority, possibly a majority for the Parti Québécois in the provincial election the following year. (Polls currently show the PQ at about 33 per cent, but with the vote split five ways in Quebec’s crowded political field anything’s possible.)
PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has been explicit about his plans. He will hold a referendum on secession “before the end of the decade,” i.e. within his first mandate. And if he had any hesitation in doing so, the election of Mr. Poilievre may be just the thing to strengthen his nerve.
We would appear to be headed, in short, for a crisis unlike any in our history: a separatist government in Quebec, backed by a strong separatist contingent in Parliament, facing off against a rookie Conservative prime minister, an anglophone from outside the province with no experience of its politics and little support from its population. This is, potentially, worse than 2011, worse than 1993, worse even than 1917.
The closest parallel would be Joe Clark’s 1979 minority government. But in that case there was another federalist alternative waiting in the wings: the Liberals, under their retired-then-unretired leader Pierre Trudeau. As unpopular as they were in the rest of Canada by then, the Liberals had kept their grip on Quebec, winning 67 seats in that year’s election – a base from which to rebound to a majority the following year, in time for the referendum.
No such miraculous rebirth is going to happen this time. The Liberals in 2025 are not expected to suffer the sort of mild setback they did in 1979, in which they retained 40 per cent of the seats, a plurality of the vote, and a still-viable leader, at least in Quebec. In all likelihood, they will be decimated, and leaderless. No aging federalist warhorse is going to save us. The Conservatives, and Mr. Poilievre, will have to face the separatists alone.
We may well be in a crisis even before then. The Supreme Court of Canada is currently considering whether to hear a challenge of Quebec’s Bill 21, the law that effectively bans the hiring of religious minorities – those whose religion requires them to wear symbols of their faith – over much of the province’s public sector. The law was upheld, reluctantly, at the lower court level, but only because the Coalition avenir Québec government had taken the trouble of wrapping the bill in Section 33 of the Charter, the notwithstanding clause.
The activist groups challenging the law argue this is an improper use of Section 33. Should the court agree with them, hold onto your hats. Quebec nationalists have imbued the clause with the status of a holy relic, the only thing that stands between the province’s sacred linguistic and cultural patrimony and the Charter’s homogenizing death ray.
A decision by the court finding that notwithstanding – the clause that was supposed to exempt laws from judicial review – was itself subject to judicial review would be likely to set off a political firestorm, inside the province and out.
What would Prime Minister Poilievre do about that?
Not that the Liberals have handled this file particularly adroitly. The Trudeau government has done little to stop Bill 21, beyond declaring that it will intervene if the issue reaches the Supreme Court.
Neither has it taken any action against Bill 96, legislation that purports not only to declare French the sole language of work in the province, but to extend this rule to federally regulated corporations; as if that were not effrontery enough, it also purports to unilaterally amend the Constitution of Canada, to give further effect to the province’s ethno-nationalist ambitions.
Sorry, did I say the feds had taken no action? My mistake. A glance at the official text of the Constitution Act 1867, as maintained on the federal Department of Justice’s website, reveals this recent addition:
Fundamental Characteristics of Quebec
90Q.1 Quebecers form a nation.
90Q.2 French shall be the only official language of Quebec. It is also the common language of the Quebec nation.
A third provision (128Q.1) purports to exempt the province’s legislators from a provision requiring “every Member of a Legislative Council or Legislative Assembly of any Province” to take the Oath of Allegiance.
Attached to each provision is a footnote advising that they “aim to amend the constitution of the province under the unilateral amending procedure set out in Section 45 of the Constitution Act, 1982.” (A similarly eccentric bit of constitutional freelancing asserts the “autonomy” of Saskatchewan, and is footnoted just as bafflingly.)
They “aim to”? What does that mean? Can a province unilaterally amend the Constitution of Canada in this way, even with regard to matters such as language rights or the division of powers, that require the consent of the Parliament of Canada and at least six other provincial legislatures, or can’t it? And if, as law and logic would suggest, it cannot, then why is the federal Department of Justice in such haste to pretend that it can?
But there it is, awaiting the inevitable Supreme Court decision to the contrary. And when the province finds out that it cannot just wave a magic wand and rewrite the Constitution to its liking, what fresh hell awaits us then?
Is Mr. Poilievre ready for this? Nothing in his character fills one with confidence. The adolescent pugnacity, the flinty, chip-on-the-shoulder defensiveness – these are the traits of a deeply insecure person, anxious at all times that others should recognize him as the top dog.
In the face of the inevitable separatist provocation, would he have the patience and the fortitude neither to lash back, nor to give in, but to maintain a position of genial immovability, steadfast and calm? Or would he fall prey to the temptation, as other leaders have before him, to “fix the Quebec problem”?
Which strain of thinking among Conservatives would he draw upon in that event? The one that demands federal leaders “call Quebec’s bluff” by “letting Quebec go,” as if the hardline response to separatist outrages is to … give them what they want?
Or would he concoct some new variant of that age-old constitutional snake oil, special status? Conservatives have tried, and failed, to seduce Quebec nationalists with this formula – deux nations, distinct society, asymmetric federalism, call it what you will – for decades. It never works. All it does is feed the nationalists’ appetite for more.
I’m no fan of Justin Trudeau’s approach to these questions – what might be described as passive non-resistance. It is surely significant that support for the BQ and the PQ has revived on his watch. But he is a) a known quantity, and b) almost certain to lose. It is Mr. Poilievre, as the newcomer to federal leadership, and as the presumptive next prime minister, from whom we most need to hear – before the next election, and before the next crisis.