In the immediate aftermath of Monday’s Quebec election – which saw François Legault’s governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) party returned to power with a massive majority of 90 seats out of 125 – many took to social media to decry the distortions of the first-past-the-post electoral system.
Premier Legault’s CAQ got a bit more than 4 votes out of ten, 41 per cent, but that gave them nearly three quarters of the seats, 70 per cent.
The second-place party in votes, left-of-centre Québec Solidaire (QS), won the support of one voter in six, more than 15 per cent of the total. But that gave QS only 11 seats out of 125, or a meagre 8 per cent, not even enough for official party status in Quebec’s National Assembly.
The once dominant Part Québécois (PQ) did even worse.
It trailed QS by about 35,000 votes, for a bit less than 15 per cent of the vote, but only managed to win three seats.
And while the populist right-wing Quebec Conservatives could tout their big bump in popular support, from 2 per cent last time to almost 13 per cent this time, that did not give them even a single seat.
They were shut out.
With a meagre 14.4 per cent Liberals remain official opposition
The party that did the best by the current electoral system was the Quebec Liberal Party.
The Liberals earned their lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation, 14.4 per cent. That’s more than ten percentage points behind their previous low, 24. 8 per cent, in the 2018 election, and 43,000 votes behind Québec Solidaire.
But the Liberals nonetheless managed to win 21 seats and retain official opposition status.
The Quebec Liberals remain the party of choice for most English and other non-French-speaking Quebeckers, and those voters are geographically concentrated on the western half of the island of Montreal, which is where the Liberals won almost all their seats.
Liberal leader Dominque Anglade seemed ecstatic with relief on election night. Some forecasters had predicted her party could lose many more of the 27 seats it held at dissolution.
In a way, the Liberals pulled an inside straight on Monday. They won pretty much every seat they could, given their extremely low popular vote.
But that pathetic popular vote tells an ominous story for the Liberals – a story their official opposition status cannot hide.
This election was the first in Quebec’s history in which the Liberals did not come either first or second in popular vote. This time they came fourth.
In 1956, the Liberals won one seat fewer than they did this year, only 20, as Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale cruised to a fourth straight majority. However, in that year, they won almost 45 per cent of the popular vote, not the miserable 14 per cent they got on Monday.
There is a harsh and unavoidable fact facing the party that led a majority government in Quebec going into the 2018 election, a mere four years ago, and that led 25 Quebec governments since Confederation, far more than any other party.
As of today, the Liberals’ support in French-speaking Quebec has shrunk to single digits. French speakers make up more than 85 per cent of Quebec’s population.
Dominique Anglade has her work cut out for her. She is a formidable person, smart, articulate, attractive, but faces huge challenges.
Her party had for many decades defined itself as the federalist option, as opposed to the separatist Parti Québécois. It was also the more big-business-friendly party, which had notably undertaken the largest infrastructure project in modern Quebec history, the massive James Bay hydro-electric project.
Legault’s CAQ has taken away the menace of Quebec separation. François Legault has promised a no-referendum regime, and, though a Quebec nationalist, calls himself a federalist these days.
The CAQ has also become the big business party, favouring low taxes and renewed investment in hydro power (much of it for export to the U.S.).
To the Liberals’ left, Québec Solidaire represents the hopes of young Quebeckers for a greener, more equitable society.
QS is also, like the PQ, a pro-Quebec-independence party. Unlike the PQ, however, sovereignty is not Québec Solidaire’s raison d’être. QS politicians rarely mention it, preferring to emphasize their progressive rather than nationalist side.
To the Liberals’ right, the Quebec Conservatives incarnate the angry, rebellious, anti-government, truculently politically incorrect worldview, which appeals to a noisy and restive portion of both Canadian and Quebec societies.
That does not leave much room for Anglade, whose best hope will be to offer a vision of competence.
The Liberal leader can always hope Legault’s big majority will make his party complacent and arrogant, and cause it to fumble important dossiers.
That has happened, in the past, to other Canadian parties which won big, only to fall on hard times subsequently. (See under: Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives federally, and Robert Bourassa’s scandal-prone Liberal regime in the 1970s, which dropped from 102 seats in 1973 to 26 in 1976.)
Québec Solidaire slips into second place
If Quebec had the new electoral system François Legault had promised in 2018 Québec Solidaire would probably be the official opposition today.
During the campaign, the QS co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois made no secret of his ambition to increase his party’s support outside of its stronghold in central and eastern Montreal, and take over the main opposition role.
Such an outcome was not to be. In fact, QS lost one of its non-Montreal seats, in the mining town of Rouyn-Noranda, while gaining two in Montreal.
QS also lost about 16,000 votes vis-à-vis the previous election, not a huge amount, but still a disappointment when you consider that the CAQ won almost 180,000 more votes this year than in 2018.
This was the first election since its founding in which Québec Soldaire dropped in popular support.
Nadeau-Dubois promises to use the position the party has to act as the unofficial and progressive opposition.
In his election night speech, the 30-something QS co-spokesperson put special emphasis on climate change. He pledged to be the voice of a generation, his own, which understands that global warming is an existential challenge from which no government has the right to shrink.
Legault and Trudeau have to get along now
Re-elected premier Legault is now free to pursue whatever agenda he chooses.
During the campaign he said he would seek increased powers currently held by the federal government over immigration.
Quebec already has more control of immigration than any other province, thanks to an agreement originally signed between the Pierre Trudeau federal government and René Lévesque’s PQ government in the 1970s. That agreement has been updated and renewed several times since then.
What Legault wants is total control over all regular migrants coming to the province, leaving the difficult and complex task of managing refugees to the feds.
The Justin Trudeau government might be wary of handing over more power to one province, with other restive and frustrated provinces looking on (did anyone mention Alberta?), but, objectively, they are not likely to have principled objections to Legault’s demands.
Just as Justin Trudeau and Ontario’s Doug Ford managed to find common ground during the pandemic, despite Trudeau having made a scapegoat of Ford during the 2019 federal election campaign, so have Trudeau and Legault managed to work together, despite Legault’s support for the federal Conservatives in 2021.
As soon as it was clear on Monday that Legault had won, the federal prime minister quickly issued a rather more-than-usually-effusive statement.
He said he was “impatient” to keep working with Legault to deal with “the challenges that matter for Quebeckers and all Canadians”.
And then Trudeau’s statement got quite specific for one of these normally boiler-plate communications.
The federal Liberal leader enumerated “solutions for the shortage of skilled workers, for making life more affordable, to favour affordable housing” and to foster investments “in infrastructure”.
Plus, with an eye, perhaps, to the Quebec premier’s weakest suit, Trudeau made a point of mentioning measures to encourage “the green economy and the fight against climate change.”
Some have noted that if you add together the CAQ and Quebec Conservative votes you get well more than half the voters opting for parties of the right.
A right-wing majority in Quebec?
For those who care about the environment, economic equality and social and racial justice that is worrying.
But Legault is not a free-market-über-alles conservative in the U.S. or English-Canadian mold. As a Quebecker he has a strong sense of the importance of the state, of the public sphere and public sector.
When Ontario’s Ford assumed responsibility for the cannabis retail market in his province, he reflexively turned it over to the private sector, for which he freely admitted he had a strong bias.
It was not so with Legault. His government set up a provincially-owned cannabis corporation on the model of the Quebec Liquor Corporation.
The result is that while in Ontario private pot shops are almost taking over some neighbourhoods the way dandelions do a lawn, in Quebec cannabis and its marketing are very much low profile and in their proper place.
Legault is like Ford in his penchant for crowd-pleasing but not necessarily well-founded stunts.
Ford abolished the fee for renewing automobile license plates, for no particular reason other than to win votes from drivers.
Legault has promised that his new government’s first act will be to limit increases for all government permits, such as a driver’s license, to three percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower.
What has characterized Legault’s regime more than the usual right-left divisions is his almost obsessive focus on identity. The most obvious example of that is Law 21, which, notionally, forbids public servants who exercise “authority” from wearing visible religious signs, but, in effect, discriminates against Muslim women.
There are groups who are still in the process of challenging Law 21 in court, and the Trudeau government has indicated it is willing to support them.
Here there can be little accommodation between the federal Liberals and Legault’s CAQ. The federal government will be wary, however, in the light of Legault’s massive victory.
There are many ways to interpret the results of Monday’s vote.
One fact is hard to deny, however: Less than 30 per cent of the electorate voted for the two parties opposed to Law 21, QS and the Liberal party.
The other three parties, who garnered about 70 per cent of the vote, all unconditionally supported Legault’s flagrantly discriminatory measure. A different electoral system would not change that outcome.
And that is, indeed, a cause for worry.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
