49
There are days of darkness in the life of any political formation. When the party of Laurier is the choice of barely one in 10 francophone Quebeckers, you might even speak of an annus ater: a black year. Yet no one is foolhardy enough to declare the Liberals a spent force, even in the province where they are now most unloved.
Mario Dumont's Action démocratique du Québec, on the other hand, gets no such benefit of the doubt. As two recent polls this week confirmed the ADQ's precipitous slide to third-party status from the government-in-waiting aura it enjoyed six months ago, the obituary writers got busy dipping their pens.
This was as predictable as the spring floods. Granted, the ADQ has never held power and, at 14, it is about 130 years younger than the federal Liberals. But there has been more than a tinge of schadenfreude in some of the hastily prepared ADQ death notices. This is a party that gives most of Quebec's intellectual class the creeps.
With a discourse that currently turns on freezing levels of immigration and encouraging a return to traditional French-Canadian family values, the ADQ is alternately denounced as lepeniste, therefore dangerous, or dismissed as ti-coune (backward).
ADQ Leader Mario Dumont
Related Articles
The University of Alberta political scientist Frédéric Boily points out in a new study of the ADQ, completed several weeks before the recent polls, that previous analyses of the party have been "strongly tinted by a fear of populism … that expresses itself in a kind of intellectual contempt." Few thinkers have wanted to acknowledge the ADQ's rise, he continues, because that would "simply tarnish Quebec's progressive reputation." No doubt about it, there is something unsavoury about the way Mr. Dumont has shamelessly exploited Quebeckers' insecurity over the survival of their language and culture for political gain. Hence, the recent poll scores may be his comeuppance for offending Quebeckers' fairness and generosity. Three by-elections on Monday will enable some to show their displeasure at such anti-immigrant pandering.
Mr. Dumont's biggest albatross, though, is his 41-member caucus, almost all of them political neophytes. One MNA explained to a radio host why neither he nor most of his colleagues ever stood up in Question Period by saying: "It's better to be quiet and look stupid than to speak and prove you are." Mr. Dumont, who at 38 may be the most talented Canadian politician of his generation, has been dragged down by this team of not-ready-for-prime-time players.
It would be erroneous, however, to dismiss the ADQ as a flameout. The ideas it brings to the table are increasingly finding favour with a plurality, if not majority, of Quebeckers. A strong and growing constituency of voters is seeking new (or old) solutions — not just with respect to cultural survival, but also on the role of the state and on individual responsibility. Neither of the established political parties has been either willing or able to successfully process these demands.
The provincial Liberals of Premier Jean Charest are enjoying levels of popularity not seen since the weeks after their first victory in 2003. But the currents that left Mr. Charest clinging to power a year ago with a precarious minority — and a third-place finish among francophones — are still the dominant ones in Quebec.
Mr. Charest's tendency to inertia is his Achilles heel. The Premier's inaction may, at the moment, look as if it's working. But Quebeckers' current preference for a timeout does not mean they want to be permanently immobile. They have just emerged from a particularly bleak winter; the debate over how to best to integrate newcomers into Quebec society, which initially propelled the ADQ forward and dominated the front pages for months until early 2008, had just become too irritating for most of them to take.
Yet each task force report that Mr. Charest's risk-averse government shelves — starting with three bricks tabled since February on health-care financing, the implementation of fees for public services and agricultural reform — is another seed planted in the ADQ's potential revival.
It is not the Parti Québécois, still at the mercy of its trade union base and demoralized by the loss of its sovereigntist raison d'être, that is going to address the challenges of health-care reform, debt reduction or university under-financing more than cosmetically. Nor would most Quebeckers trust it to. The current and former trade union honchos who dominate the party's executive ranks and dictate its policies are, most Quebeckers now agree, the main cause of the province's immobilisme.
No one still has illusions that Mr. Charest is a reformer. But no one doubts either that he is a survivor. As a second-term Premier, though, he is already tempting fate by apparently seeking a third successive mandate. Has he forgotten that it's been more than half a century since any Quebec premier (or party) got one?
