Francois Legault, pictured in the centre, announcing the end of the legislative session on June 10.
Francois Legault, pictured in the centre, announcing the end of the legislative session on June 10. Credit: CPAC Credit: CPAC

There will be an election in Quebec this coming Monday, October 3, and it looks like it will be a perfect storm for the first-past-the-post system.

The governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is likely to win somewhere between 37 and 40 per cent of the popular vote, but that will give it about three quarters or 75 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly.

The composition of the Quebec legislature will not correspond to the choices voters make. But it could have been a different story.

When he was a candidate four years ago, CAQ leader François Legault promised, without qualification of any sort, that he would reform Quebec’s electoral system. 

Reporters pointed out that Justin Trudeau had made the same promise, federally, in 2015, then, once he won under the existing system, reneged

Legault scoffed.

I am not Trudeau, he said. I will have the guts to carry out my pledge. 

That was then. Now, Legault says he doesn’t perceive any demand from the population for a different electoral system, so it is no longer a priority for him. 

It just so happens that the current system hugely favours the CAQ. That’s because the governing party faces a highly fractionalized opposition.

Four parties are competing with the CAQ in this election and all opinion polls indicate they are close to each other on popular support. No poll gives any opposition party as much as 20 per cent of the vote. They are all in the teens. 

The two traditional governing parties are in trouble

For many decades from 1970 onward the main parties in Quebec were the federalist and centrist Liberal Party of Quebec (not formally connected to the federal Liberals) and the separatist, sometimes social-democratic Parti Québécois (PQ). 

Until the last election in 2018 one or other of those two parties had formed the government of Quebec for nearly five decades.

But those two traditional parties have now fallen on hard times. 

The Liberals have long been the overwhelming choice of English and other non-francophone Quebeckers, and they still are today. 

But, until recently, the Quebec Liberals have also enjoyed significant support among francophones. Last time, the party won 31 out of the 124 seats in Quebec’s National Assembly, more than half of which were in predominantly francophone areas. 

Most of those seats are in danger this time around. 

French-speaking Quebeckers appear to have abandoned the Liberals, now led by Dominique Anglade, the Liberals’ first woman leader and the first person of colour to lead a major party in Quebec.

Anglade is an articulate leader with an impressive personal story. 

She is a mother raising children who are still in school, and an engineer who can talk knowledgably about infrastructure projects. As the campaign has progressed, Anglade has earned points for her character and intelligence. 

That might save her party some of the seats it currently holds.

As for the PQ, it dropped to a mere seven seats last time, and, at the outset of the campaign, looked like it could drop even further this time. 

At one point, many polls had the PQ reduced to only one or two seats, but solid performances in two televised debates by leader Paul St. Pierre Plamondon appear to have helped the party somewhat. 

The party founded by René Lévesque, which held power as recently as eight years ago, could now, observers say, save face by winning a handful of seats.

A socialist party and one on the populist right

Vying for support with the PQ and Liberals are two (relatively) new kids on the block: the left-of-centre Quebec Solidaire (QS) and the Quebec Conservative party. 

Québec Solidaire has been around for a while. It was founded as a coalition of progressive forces in the early 2000s. 

QS has competed in five Quebec elections, starting in 2007, but until the last election it did not win more than three seats. Last time it won 10, and doubled its popular vote vis-a-vis the previous election. 

Québec Solidaire has a collective leadership model. It has two spokespeople, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and Manon Massé, and the role is rotated

Currently Nadeau-Dubois has the job. He has been acting as de facto leader during the campaign. 

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois gained prominence in the spring of 2012, when he was one of the leaders of a series of student strikes that became known as le printemps érable, a play on words on le printemps arabe, or Arab spring. (The English “maple spring” does not capture the ironic reference.)

Nadeau-Dubois has generated a lot of conversation with his call for a one per cent wealth tax on taxpayers’ net worth in excess of $1 million and a 35 per cent tax on the portions of inheritances that excess $1 million. 

He has also elaborated ambitious plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which include a new tax on oversized gas-guzzling vehicles.

As for the Conservatives – in their current form they have existed since 2009, but have been an insignificant factor, winning zero seats and almost as few votes – until last year. That is when they chose former radio talk-show personality Éric Duhaime as their leader.

Duhaime’s populist straight talk has managed to attract the support of the not inconsiderable number of Quebeckers who, like the truckers who occupied Ottawa last winter, have been vehemently opposed to all government mandates to deal with the COVID epidemic, from masks to vaccines to restrictions on gatherings.

The Quebec Conservatives are not formally connected to Pierre Poilievre’s federal party, but the two parties employ much of the same rhetoric.

Like Poilievre, Duhaime’s theme is freedom (although Duhaime would not extend that untrammeled freedom to a teacher who wore a hijab). 

Also like the federal Conservatives, Duhaime is hostile to government action to combat greenhouse gas emissions. 

Duhaime is the only party leader to call for Quebec to allow fracking for shale gas. 

But while the four opposition parties might range from the socialist left to the far right, the leader in the catbird seat is the current premier, the leader of the CAQ.

Duplessis reincarnate?

François Legault helped form the Coalition Avenir Québec in large part to move past what he and others called the “sterile debate” between federalist and separatist which had dominated Quebec politics for too long.

The CAQ gave itself the name it did because it invited both separatists and federalists to set aside their constitutional differences and form a coalition, focused on economic growth and competitiveness, and on making gains for Quebec within Canada.

In a way, Legault was reimagining Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale party, which had governed Quebec almost continuously from 1936 to 1960, and then again from 1966 to 1970.

The Union Nationale combined conservative, pro-foreign investment, anti-labour-union policies with a close alliance with the Roman Catholic hierarchy and a nationalist streak that emphasized provincial autonomy. 

The Quebec of 2022 is different from that of the first half of the 20th century, so Legault had to, in essence, modernize Duplessis’ vision. 

In that, he has been remarkably successful.

After winning power in 2018, Legault proceeded, as he promised, to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy by partially decentralizing the health care system, reducing the size of the provincial public service (especially that of the publicly-owned electric utility Hydro Quebec), and abolishing local school boards. 

On the non-economic and administrative front, Legault focused hard on what Quebeckers call la question identitaire – the issue of identity. 

The CAQ leader’s two proudest achievements are Law 21, which makes it illegal for public servants such as teachers and police officers to wear visible signs, such as a hijab, of their religion, and Law 96, which tightens the Quebec French Language Charter often referred to as Law 101. 

Law 96 reduces the minimum size for a business that must operate in French from 50 to 25 employees. It also changes the status of many towns that previously offered services in both French and English, requiring them, heretofore, to operate exclusively in French.

In 2020, the need to cope with the unexpected and frightening contingencies of a global pandemic completely took over the Legault government’s agenda – as it did for many other governments.

From the outset, the CAQ leader was ready to use the full power of the state to limit the spread of a disease that threatened the viability of a health care system which is stretched to the limit at the best of times. 

Legault was the only North American leader to impose curfews on his population – and he did so more than once.

There were big failures in Quebec, most notably in the long-term care sector, where the death toll was disastrous. But Legault’s steadfastness earned him respect, and probably accounts for a good part of his current popularity.

Oddly, there has been little talk during the 2022 campaign about the pandemic.

In debates, Legault has tried to make it seem as though the choice was between his sober and responsible economic program and what he calls Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois’ “pays des merveilles” (house of wonders). 

In one debate, the CAQ and QS leaders argued intensely over QS’s proposed new taxes, including a big one on the purchase of some vehicles. 

Legault said buyers of Dodge Caravans would pay $7,000 extra under the QS plan. Nadeau-Dubois countered that those who bought Toyota RAV4s would pay no extra tax.

The QS leader added that the fuel-efficient RAV4 is hugely more popular in Quebec than the polluting Caravan. In 2021, for every single Caravan they purchased, Quebeckers bought twenty-four RAV4s.

More importantly, in the face of Legault’s near-condescending attacks, the QS leader did not try to fudge his party’s tax policies. 

The new taxes would be aimed, Nadeau-Dubois said, at achieving greater economic and social equality. As well, he explained, the government needs additional revenue to adequately finance health care, education and social services – all of which are currently underfunded. 

While Legault hopes many Quebeckers will find Québec Solidaire’s so-called tax-and-spend proposals scary, there has been a lot of other noise in the campaign to distract voters’ attention away from bread-and-butter issues.

In fact, this year in Quebec economic and social policies took a back seat to

the perennial conundrum of identity – or, more precisely, the divisive issue of immigration.

Outbursts of anti-immigrant bigotry

François Legault has proposed restricting the number of new immigrants to Quebec to 50,000 per year. The PQ wants to reduce that to a paltry 30,000. 

On the other side of the argument, both the Liberals and QS want to increase immigration, the former to 70,000 per year, the latter to 80,000.

Nadeau-Dubois says Quebec’s regions, outside the major cities, are in desperate need of new workers, and cannot find them locally. 

Both the QS’s Nadeau-Dubois and Liberal leader Dominique Anglade point out that Quebec employers now depend on thousands of temporary foreign workers. 

Part of Nadeau-Dubois’s immigration strategy would be to provide those temporary workers with a clear path to permanent residence status.

But most of the campaign talk on immigration has not been about numbers.

Early in the campaign, Legault put his foot in his mouth when he implied immigrants, in general, do not share Quebec “values” and were likely to import extremist ideologies from their home countries.

The CAQ leader had to apologize for that misstatement. 

One suspects, however, that Legault was acting like the lawyer who knowingly utters something out of order in court precisely because he wants the jury – or, at least, some members of the jury – to hear it.

Legault tried to move on from immigration after that episode, but in the dying days of the campaign the words of one of his cabinet ministers put the issue back on the front burner.

Less than a week before voting day, video emerged of Legault’s minister of immigration Jean Boulet telling a local audience that, in his view, immigrants don’t work, settle exclusively in Montreal, and refuse to learn French. 

Those allegations bear no resemblance to the truth, as almost every commentator was quick to point out.

And so, again, Legault was forced to apologize. 

Indeed, when questioned by Radio-Canada’s Alec Castonguay, Legault said flatly that Boulet would not be invited to serve as immigration minister in a post-election CAQ government. 

The other party leaders all pounced, of course. 

Even Éric Duhaime, the master of wanton political incorrectness, couldn’t resist taking a shot. He called for Boulet’s immediate resignation.

As for the voters, in interviews some expressed abhorrence at the CAQ’s unjustified and persistent denigration of hardworking immigrants. 

Others said they found Boulet’s comments to be disagreeable, but would nonetheless enthusiastically vote for the CAQ on Monday.  

And then there were quite a few who told reporters they believed everything Boulet said was true, 100 per cent, despite all the factual evidence to the contrary.

In the end, neither this nor any other mini-scandal can do much to slow Legault’s march to what looks like a massive victory. 

The only thing to bear in mind as the CAQ racks up win after win on Monday night is this: Four years ago, Legault solemnly promised to change the system responsible for unearned landslides of the sort we’re about to see. 

The perks of power have a persuasive way of changing a politician’s mind.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...