By Robert Libman MONTREAL - The recurring musical “Little Orphan Anglo” is set for a five-week run as we traverse another election campaign. The Quebec anglophone community, once proud and influential, has seen its political capital and value diminished in the last couple of decades to its lowest point ever. We have become political orphans with no major political party willing to be seen with us.
In provincial elections, the narrow spectrum of choices forces us to choose the lesser of two evils. With the Parti Québécois, we know where it stands and it knows where we stand. For the PQ, language rights or many of the issues of concern to the anglophone community represent a zero-sum game. It denounces as a threat to French any discourse related to improved access to English schools or other institutions, or greater presence of the community or our language in the public domain.
The only other major provincial alternative, the Quebec Liberal Party, knows full well that we won’t park our vote with the PQ so it takes the community for granted and expects us to continue to vote for it as loyal sheep. When any political party knows that it has voters in its pocket, it also knows it does not need to make any effort to address their concerns. Its energy and financial resources are better spent mining more lucrative electoral demographics or regions elsewhere.
Even more infuriating is that the Liberals inflict damage on or punish our community and still expect us to vote for them. Bills 104 and 103 are perfect illustrations. These laws were adopted to deal with a loophole in Bill 101 that allowed a minuscule percentage, one 20th of one per cent, of the number of kids in French schools in Quebec to attend English schools. When the Supreme Court struck down the law, the Liberals rushed to appeal it, despite the fact that enrolment in English schools has dropped from 250,000 to 100,000 students in the past generation. They wanted to outflank the nationalist credentials of the PQ, knowing that their political orphans had no where else to park their vote.
In federal elections, the majority of francophone Quebec voters have been very strategic for the past 20 years. They have hedged their bets and continued to support the Bloc Québécois to maintain a loud presence and leverage in Ottawa, where they can hold the balance of power. The federal parties have to continue the strategy of currying favour with soft Quebec nationalism as the way to make gains in Quebec, so the prospect of making overtures to the anglophone community has been unthinkable. In this campaign, NDP leader Jack Layton has the nerve to plaster his face all over the west end of the city yet doesn’t have the courtesy to put up a single word of English on his signs to address the many English speakers who live in these areas.
If any utterance is made that is misconstrued as even indirectly sympathetic to Quebec anglophones, it is immediately seized upon and plastered in the French media and open-line radio shows. Case in point are the innocuous truths uttered recently by both Maxime Bernier and Larry Smith of the Conservative Party, who were harangued and ridiculed in the French media for basically saying that francophone Quebecers are secure, confident and capable enough without the need for coercive or outdated language laws. The Liberal Party chimed in to also attack these comments.
In this election campaign, however, are we seeing a slight and subtle shift in this tendency by the Conservative Party? Stephen Harper held a rare massive rally in the West Island this week and addressed a largely anglophone audience. He refused to disown Larry Smith’s remarks, despite media attempts to get him to do so. The chief editorial writer of La Presse, André Pratte, has questioned the strategy of voting for the Bloc, and La Presse columnist Lysiane Gagnon, in a piece last week headlined “Québec, le grand absent,” alluded to the fact that Quebec has lost influence and risks being ignored by Ottawa for sitting outside the governing party as a result of always electing MPs from the Bloc.
Is this a message that the Conservatives might have recognized? Have they given up on making inroads in the regions of Quebec and in the soft nationalist vote, resigning themselves to the fact that Quebecers will continue to vote for the BQ anyway? Will they start targeting or courting the anglo vote, or Montreal, to at least pick up some pieces in Quebec? It remains to be seen if this is the case. If so, maybe we have found our Daddy Warbucks and Quebec anglophones for once may not be the political orphans of the campaign.
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Robert Libman is a former member of the Quebec National Assembly.