Unhappy with third party status, and fearful of relegation to irrelevance, the Parti Québécois caucus, and leading PQ officials such as President Monique Richard have rallied to the candidacy of Pauline Marois, putting her in line to replace André Boisclair as leader.

Funnily enough, it was the brief (29 hours), distinctly comical candidacy of Gilles Duceppe that mobilized caucus support behind Marois, twice defeated as candidate for the job. When Duceppe announced last Friday he was ready to leave Ottawa for the PQ leadership, he precipitated the move of virtually every PQ member of the National Assembly to back Marois who declared her candidacy a few hours after Duceppe.

Action Démocratique du Québec leader Mario Dumont described the scene as everyone crowding into the same lifeboat, as the ship sinks. Soon they will be fighting, he suggested, swinging away at each other with the boat’s oars.

The general euphoria of having a consensus candidate has so far put off any discussion of how the next leader will be chosen. Likely, the caucus and party hierarchy will simply seek to have the PQ Council (made up of riding officials, and other notables) ratify their choice of Marois.

Only 18 months ago, Pauline Marois received only 30 per cent, while Boisclair got 53 per cent, in the election to succeed Bernard Landry. And that was a vote of party members, following a long leadership campaign. It was Landry, who convinced Marois not to run against him, before he was anointed leader, so Marois had some reason to show sympathy towards Duceppe when he backed off from challenging her, even though Duceppe tried to forestall her candidacy by announcing before she did, and unhappily for him, without having the support he thought he did.

The advantage for Marois, and the PQ caucus, of not having a leadership race is that the membership of the party is quite pesky about getting leadership candidates to pledge to move ahead with sovereignty. How else to understand why, in her race against Boisclair, Marois proposed that as Quebec premier she would create something called the Ministry for the Preparation of Accession to Sovereignty.

Before the recent provincial election, it was the party membership that wanted the new leader to insist the PQ would hold a referendum on independence quickly after being elected. Boisclair went along, and that led to the poor electoral outcome for his party. So he gets to be the scapegoat.

Marois has made it clear, if she is chosen there will be no fixed date for a referendum, though sovereignty, along with social democracy, will remain one of the two pillars of the party.

Marois is an experienced cabinet minister, the only person to have held four major portfolios. She gets the credit for creating the important $5.00 a day child-care spaces, as Education Minister.

But her political record is mixed. She came into politics in 1979 as an assistant to Jacques Parizeau. She was elected, and named a minister, in 1981. However, following her first leadership defeat (to Pierre-Marc Johnson) she lost her riding in the general election of 1985, and was defeated in a by-election in 1988, as well as losing the second leadership bid, and being talked out of the third.

Political parties either emerge within parliaments and legislatures, or seek to enter the formal political arena from the outside. Leaders who had splintered from the Liberal party caucus founded both the PQ (René Lévesque) and the ADQ (Jean Allaire). But Lévesque created the PQ as an alliance of nationalist political parties from within and outside the legislature. Broad social movement support has been critical to the PQ.

The challenge facing Pauline Marois is to become the leader of the extra-parliamentary opposition to the right wing agendas of the Liberals and the ADQ, and to translate that support into an electoral success. But her initial statement has her looking in another direction. She wants to “re-centre” the party and make the state more efficient. Outside the legislature, Québec Solidaire and the Green Party are looking to win over the support of social movements.

The PQ has believed it needed a coalition of right and left nationalists to achieve independence, that the national question had priority over the social question, that the left alone was too small, or too weak to win independence. Leading the PQ to electoral victory has until now depended on being the only opposition to a failing government.

As the PQ caucus choice to lead them in the legislature as early as the fall and into the next election, expected soon, Marois can choose to battle on the social question, and embarrass both the Liberal and the ADQ, or she can compete with the two other parties for the right of centre vote, and downplay the social question.

As the PQ gets itself ready for the new three-party world of Quebec politics, it looks to a woman to lead them out of third place — but the party needs to find a way to re-connect its legislative wing with both its national identity, and social democracy support.

A vote for the PQ has not just been a matter of individual preference for one thing or another. In choosing the PQ, voters were joining a national undertaking of major proportions. Re-defining that national project as a social question is not going to be easy for Pauline Marois, if ever she decides to go that way.

In her speech announcing her candidacy she said the PQ project was “francophone above all else” suggesting the civic nationalist dimension is being set aside in favour of fighting Mario Dumont on national identity.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...