A vote against the other guys

“The key to this thing is turnout,” the veteran Liberal strategist was telling me. “If the turnout is low, say 70 to 75 per cent, I’d say a majority is within reach. If it’s above 75%, it’s a minority. Liberals always do well when there’s a low turnout.”

Well. We can consign that bit of wisdom to the dustbin..., along with much else we thought we knew about Quebec. The turnout, as it, er, turned out, was just 71% -- barely above the all-time low of 70% recorded in the last election. That  may not sound too bad in this age of declining voter interest, but turnout is generally higher in Quebec than elsewhere: in previous elections, it has ranged as high as 85%. 

So we should be wary of the new wisdom, as much as the old. Historic, realigning elections -- think of 1976, 1970, 1960 -- are usually reflected in high turnouts, a surge of “throw the bums out” sentiment. That wasn’t the case here. There’s no denying the Action Démocratique du Québec has achieved a spectacular breakthrough, jumping from five seats to 41 and nearly doubling its share of the popular vote from pre-election polls. But it seems to be less a matter of a wave of enthusiasm for the ADQ than it is boredom with the old-line parties. Some voters switched from the Liberals and the Parti Québécois to the Adéquistes. The rest stayed home.

Much of that, in turn, seems to have been about the party leaders. It would be hard to describe this as a campaign of ideas. The ADQ came closest, for example with its proposal to abolish the province’s school boards. But for the most part its appeal was rooted in the person of Mario Dumont -- just as voters’ disdain for the other two parties must surely be attributed, in large part, to widespread disaffection for their respective leaders. Much of this was deserved -- it would be hard to think of two weaker figures, even in Canadian politics -- but it would be interesting to see how the parties might have fared with a leader who was not either a coke-snorting homosexual or -- worse -- suspected of English sympathies.

Yes, but.  Explain it away all you want, you can’t argue with the numbers: the worst popular vote showing for the Parti Quebecois since its first election, in 1970. The worst for the Liberals since … ever. In 37 elections since 1867, the Liberal Party of Quebec had never got less than 33.8% of the vote. That was Robert Bourassa’s score in 1976, when he was the “most hated man in Quebec” after six years of scandal and corruption. And Mr. Charest, governing in good times, untouched by major scandal, has done worse.

Mr. Charest, moreover, who was the beneficiary of perhaps the most concentrated campaign of federal support in the history of Quebec, going back to Paul Martin’s “asymmetric federalism” policy, through Stephen Harper’s pledge of “open federalism,” the recognition of Quebec as a nation, the seat at Unesco, and culminating in the grotesque multi-billion-dollar bribe in last week’s federal budget, the resolution (so it was said) of the “fiscal imbalance.”

And after all this -- indeed, after forty years of this -- what is the result? The lowest popular vote in history for the only party in Quebec that is even nominally “federalist.” Mr. Harper and Mr. Charest have stretched the federation further than it has ever been stretched before, and two-thirds of the Quebec electorate have voted for parties that would go further yet.

So while everyone is celebrating the demise of the Parti Quebecois, and saluting the strategic genius of Mr. Harper, bear this in mind. Mr. Harper bet the farm on Mr. Charest -- and lost. Having ratified nationalist mythologies, appealed to nationalist prejudices, argued from nationalist principles, he has only whetted Quebecers’ appetite for more concessions. True, he will probably benefit personally from the PQ’s collapse -- the Bloc must be feeling postively ill at the prospect of a spring election -- but we should not assume the rise of Mr. Dumont and the ADQ is as much of an unalloyed boon to the Conservatives as presented. And even if it is in the Conservatives’ interests, it may not be in Canada's.

Mr. Dumont, often praised as a principled politician in Mr. Harper’s mold, is in fact as inconstant as a summer rainshower -- or, for that matter, as Mr. Harper -- and on the most fundamental of questions. A decade ago he was for separation. Five years ago he was for status quo federalism. Now he is for “autonomism,” the latest in a long line of pseudonyms for that most unworkable of constitutional models, special status, in which Quebec would be under none of the constraints of federalism, but would enjoy all of its privileges.

On the other hand, he must know that he owes little of his success to this. Quebecers voted, not for what was in his constitutional platform, but for what wasn’t: namely, the obligation to choose. For reasons of their own, both Mr. Charest and Mr. Boisclair tried to polarize the debate in this election, on traditional federalist-separatist lines. There’s some evidence that Quebecers would like to change the subject in that regard, and for that let us be truly thankful, or at least hopeful. But more than that, Quebecers hate having to choose between them. 

That is why separatists have only ever been able to appeal to them by giving their plans soothing-sounding labels like sovereignty-association, political-and-economic-partnership and so on, and why federalists are always pretending there is some half-way house of special status available to them. Mr. Dumont, in this light, looks a lot less new or revolutionary than he pretends. 

Moreover, Mr. Dumont wants, above all, to become premier. To do that, he must erase the perception/reality that his party is a one-man band, its caucus at best inexperienced in governing, at worst a bunch of yahoos. Is his agenda advanced by chasing constitutional rainbows, or by  demostrating managerial competence, pursuing practical solutions to the problems that really confront Quebec today -- namely, the crushing burden of living in what is North America’s most over-taxed, over-indebted, over-regulated jurisdiction?

Much, then, will depend on the course Mr. Dumont adopts. If he focuses, in the position of influence he now holds, on cleaning things up at home, reducing the size and reach of the state, all will be well, for Quebec and Canada. But if instead he pursues his autonomist agenda, then Mr. Harper is in for a big headache, as are we.