At the height of her now famous confrontation with François Legault near the end of Wednesday’s televised tête-à-tête, Pauline Marois attempted to play down the fears he was doing his best to raise over her party’s proposed référendums d’initiative populaire. As adopted at the Parti Québécois’s last convention, the appealingly named RIPs would allow a petition of 15% of Quebec’s voters to trigger a referendum on separation — well, a referendum on anything, but separation was the issue that most exercised Legault.
The measure, he said, would “send us into the ravine with the caribou” — a tangy reference to PQ hardliners, of which Legault was once one of the most ardent — allowing the militants to pitch the province into a referendum: a referendum, he added, the PQ would surely lose. Pish-posh, Marois retorted (I’m paraphrasing). “I’m not afraid of the people. I won’t stop them from initiating a call for a referendum.”
I’m not afraid of the people. Even by the usual standards of campaign shamelessness, this was epic. If there is one thing PQ leaders have stood for for most of the last thirty-odd years, it is total and abject fear of the people, at least when the subject is separation. They cannot even bring themselves to call it by its real name, still less to put it to a straight up-or-down vote. Thus the various temporizing dodges to which successive PQ leaders have resorted, from Pierre-Marc Johnson’s “national affirmation” to Lucien Bouchard’s “winning conditions” and beyond: anything but hold the referendum their supporters demanded. Like Penelope, the PQ leaders always just have this bit of weaving to finish first.
The only one since Lévesque to risk it was Parizeau. Certainly he was the only one with a plan for what to do next or the stones to go through with it: not the promised leisurely negotiations with the rest of Canada, which as I’ve explained before would go nowhere, but a unilateral declaration of independence, a putsch, effectively, to be achieved within days. It wouldn’t have succeeded even then — nobody in Quebec had signed up for that — but at least it would have been exciting.

It has been a difficult campaign for the PQ leader, what with having to redraft both her referendum policy and the candidates’ French tests on the fly

By contrast, while Marois would not stop people from calling for a referendum, it turns out she is quite prepared to stop them from having one. Where Parizeau would have duped the public (remember the lobster pot?), Marois’ victims seem to have been her own militants: they had been persuaded not to devour her, as they had her wavering predecessors, on the understanding that the initiatives populaires would be binding. Only now, in the waning days of the election, do they find they have been had.
Still, in one respect Marois has outdone even Parizeau. She has, by common consent, run on the most frankly discriminatory platform of any party leader in this country’s recent history: from forbidding public servants to wear any religious symbol but the crucifix, to barring non-French speakers from running for public office, to the platform’s precisely worded anguish at the numbers of those living in Montreal whose “mother tongue” is something other than French. Add to that the promise of further restrictions on the use of English in the schools and in the workplace, and in a sense we are already in another country: it is hard to believe we are discussing life in 21st century Canada.
The difference is that with Parizeau, the militants got the whole package: the minority-baiting and the country-wrecking. Whereas with Marois the one comes at the expense of the other. Knowing that she could not run on a straight-up pledge to hold a referendum for fear of alienating the soft nationalists, but needing to keep the base from straying to the hardline Québec Solidaire to her left, she offers headscarf bans and French-only CEGEPs instead. It’s as much a mark of desperation as anything else, a way of setting the PQ apart in a crowded field. While the early polls had the PQ in the lead, it was at historically low levels of popular support.
We shall see what the weekend polls hold. It has been a difficult campaign for the PQ leader, what with having to redraft both her referendum policy and the candidates’ French tests on the fly (she could deal with the inevitable anglo complaints, but aboriginal groups were another thing). The campaign she might have preferred to fight, on issues of corruption or social policy, has instead become about the one thing she most dreads talking about: separation.

[W]hile Marois would not stop people from calling for a referendum, it turns out she is quite prepared to stop them from having one

But make no mistake. The ethnocentric positions that have appalled so many commentators, at least outside Quebec, did not spring new-born from Marois’ fevered brow. The particular position of the province’s francophones, a majority within the province that nevertheless sees itself as an imperilled minority within North America, has given licence to a majoritarianism that would be repugnant anywhere else. Every province has its share of rednecks, but in no other province are they given the leadership of major political parties.
Fortunately, there are limits. However much the province’s hyper-nationalists would like to believe their compatriots conform to their own narrow view of the world, Quebecers at large consistently confound the stereotypes. Marois may hope to gin up conflict with the rest of Canada over this or that chauvinist policy, as previous PQ leaders thought they could over patriation and the Clarity Act. I greatly fear Quebecers, should they trust her party to form a government, will prove just as much a disappointment to her as to her predecessors.