Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rises during Question Period on Sept. 25, in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Quebec Premier François Legault denied he was endorsing the federal Conservative Party when he last month called on the Bloc Québécois to vote for a Tory confidence motion to bring down Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.
No one in the Quebec media seemed to believe him.
After all, Mr. Legault had tried to put his thumb on the scales during the 2021 federal election campaign by rejecting the Liberals and New Democrats as “too centralizing,” and all but explicitly backing Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives. The paternalistically inclined Premier seemed last week to be once again telling Quebeckers how to vote at the federal level – just like his idol Maurice Duplessis did in the 1950s.
Despite being at the height of his popularity in 2021, Mr. Legault could not persuade Quebec voters to get behind the Tories. And with his personal poll numbers now tanking, his powers of political persuasion have likely only grown weaker.
This may go some way toward explaining why current Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre has so far proved only marginally more successful than Mr. O’Toole at winning over Quebeckers. The Tories may be crushing the competition in the rest of Canada, but they remain stuck in third place in Quebec. An Abacus Data poll this week pegged Bloc support at 37 per cent, with the Liberals at 28 per cent. The Tories were stuck at just 22 per cent – up only slightly from the 18.6 per cent the party won in 2021.
Beyond their Quebec City-area strongholds, the Conservatives are a non-factor in most of the province’s 78 ridings. The party came in a distant fourth in the recent by-election in the Lasalle-Émard-Verdun riding, with only 11.5 per cent of the vote.
The Tories’ persistent failure to launch in Quebec might seem curious given Mr. Poilievre’s concerted efforts to woo voters in the province by emphasizing the same pocketbook issues that have boosted Tory fortunes in the rest of the country.
He has made repeated trips to targeted Quebec ridings. While he denigrates public and private mainstream media in English Canada, and largely boycotts them, Mr. Poilievre has granted regular interviews to Radio-Canada and TVA and adopted a far less abrasive style in his interactions with journalists in the province.
While the Alberta-bred Mr. Poilievre speaks accented French – despite his French-sounding name, his first language is English – he is vastly more comfortable in the language of Molière than Mr. O’Toole or Andrew Scheer, who struggled to string together sentences in French, or even Stephen Harper, who spoke decipherable French. Mr. Poilievre’s Venezuelan-born and Quebec-raised wife, Anaida Poilievre, speaks flawless French with a Québécois accent and is featured in Tory ads that have been saturating the Quebec airwaves in recent weeks.
So what gives?
Le Journal de Montréal columnist Philippe Léger recently came up with five reasons Mr. Poilievre has failed to seduce Quebeckers. The first relates to Quebeckers’ refusal to import English Canada’s “more polarized and grotesque” political culture. “The Bloc Québécois translates this refusal and plays the adult in the room.”
Please. Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet is no choir boy and punches below the belt, too. In justifying the Bloc’s move to vote against the first Tory confidence motion last month, effectively propping up the Liberals, he said: “The Conservatives are bad for Quebec. I would not replace a viper with a tarantula or vice versa.”
Mr. Léger is closer to the mark in identifying Mr. Poilievre’s opposition to Quebec’s secularism law, known as Bill 21, which bans the wearing of religious symbols by some public employees. Mr. Trudeau is even more stridently opposed to the law and has said Ottawa would intervene before the Supreme Court to have it struck down. But the Liberal base in anglophone and allophone Quebec is solidly against Bill 21.
Mr. Léger is also correct in underscoring the strong consensus in Quebec in favour of medical assistance in dying, abortion rights, gun control and the environment. Those issues derailed the Quebec campaigns of Mr. O’Toole and Mr. Scheer. And Mr. Poilievre appears to be no more successful in shaking these monkeys off his back.
Still, perhaps the main reason Mr. Poilievre has failed to crack the “Quebec code” is that he is a non-Quebecker. Mr. Léger did not mention that one. But the reality is that no non-Quebecker has become prime minister and won a majority of the province’s seats since Lester Pearson in 1965. The last non-Quebec-born Tory leader to sweep the province was John Diefenbaker in 1958, and that was thanks to Mr. Duplessis.
Francophone Quebeckers seem to prefer to vote for a party whose leader is one of them. There is not much Mr. Poilievre can do about it. That aspect of the Quebec code may simply be uncrackable.