Stephen Harper's Conservatives were riding high in Quebec during the summer of 2008. Francophone voters seemed to be looking for a reason to abandon the Bloc Québécois and Mr. Harper had given them one with a House of Commons motion declaring the Québécois a nation.
The Tories led the polls in Quebec for weeks before the writs for the fall federal election were drawn up. Mr. Harper's strategists believed that the party was on the cusp of achieving its elusive majority government, with signs of a blue wave washing over most of rural Quebec.
In the end, the Conservatives blew it because of a decision months earlier to trim funding for the arts. The cuts were not huge and amounted to barely 1 per cent of federal spending on the arts nationally. In the artful descriptions of Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe and Liberal premier Jean Charest, however, they were nothing short of a grave threat to the survival of the Québécois nation.
The Prime Minister made matters worse with a mid-campaign attack on the Quebec television celebrities who denounced the cuts during their annual awards show, an event Mr. Harper dismissed as a "rich gala subsidized by taxpayers." He seemed oblivious to the fact that Quebeckers love their TV stars and had tuned in in droves to watch them pick up their prizes at the Gémeaux awards.
This tone deafness to what makes Quebeckers tick once again jeopardizes Mr. Harper's recent inroads in the province. This year's Gémeaux gala runs Sept. 20 on Radio-Canada, the CBC's French-language network, and Tory cuts to the public broadcaster are shaping up to be an election issue in Quebec. Federalist and sovereigntist politicians are united in calling for their reversal.
Last week, Quebec Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Jean-Marc Fournier even went to Ottawa to argue for a $150-million increase in the annual subsidy for CBC/Radio-Canada, restoring federal funding for the public broadcaster to the $1.17-billion it received in 2008.
Mr. Fournier insisted that the cuts make it impossible for the network to fulfill its Broadcasting Act mandate in both official languages.
"The creation of a public broadcaster with an obligation to inform [Canadians] in English and French is an expression of the federalist pact between Canada's two founding nations," he said before arriving in Ottawa armed with a consultant's study commissioned by the Ontario and Quebec governments and a set of proposals for reinvigorating the network.
Mr. Fournier, who once served as former federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's chief Quebec adviser, got commitments from the Liberals and New Democrats to reverse the $115-million in cuts announced in 2012. That hit and earlier Tory cuts have forced the network to slash 2,100 jobs since 2009, with at least 1,000 more on the chopping block by 2020.
The axe has fallen disproportionately on the French network, even though it racks up much bigger ratings in Quebec than the CBC gets in English Canada. The report by consultant Michel Houle showed that Radio-Canada has also punched far above its weight in generating advertising revenue and specialty-channel subscription fees. This imbalance will only grow now that CBC can no longer count on ad revenue from Hockey Night in Canada.
Justin Trudeau's Liberals are jumping to Radio-Canada's defence, with MP Stéphane Dion telling Le Devoir that a Liberal government could do "more than just cancel the cuts." But his party is ill-placed to advocate for the public broadcaster now, having slashed its federal grant by a quarter under Jean Chrétien. The Houle report estimates that the broadcaster's federal grant would be $1.6-billion today if its annual subsidy had merely kept pace with inflation after 1990. Instead, it will get almost $600-million less from Ottawa this year.
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, who has emphasized his party's promise to reverse the Radio-Canada cuts at recent rallies in Quebec, stands to gain the most from any cultural backlash against the Tories similar to the one that wrecked Mr. Harper's chances of winning a majority in 2008. The NDP has already replaced the Bloc as the first choice of Quebec artists on the federal scene.
Parti Québécois Leader Pierre Karl Péladeau also sees political hay in the issue. Although he crusaded against the public broadcaster's subsidy when he officially ran media giant Quebecor, Mr. Péladeau now praises Radio-Canada as "one of the principal vehicles [Quebeckers have] to broadcast our cultural distinctiveness within Canada." In an open letter last year, he called on Quebeckers to "rise up" against the cuts.
Come election time, the Tories may regret making them.
Konrad Yakabuski