Jean Charest has been called the most federalist premier that Quebec has had in the four decades that politics in this province have been dominated by the sovereignty question. And if there’s anything for which his Liberal Party still stands, other than money and the influence of those who have it, it’s federalism.
So why do the recent gains by the sovereignists, mainly at the expense of François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec party, benefit Charest and his party?
Because the last thing the Liberals need is the re-alignment of Quebec politics along a left-right axis promised by the initial popularity of Legault’s constitutionally neutral party.
The Liberals need polarization over the “national question” to continue in order to maintain their electoral and financial base of unconditional federalists – or more precisely, anti-sovereignists.
The Liberal Party needs the “pequophobia” – fear of the election of a Parti Québécois government – of non-francophones and other unconditional anti-sovereignists to keep them loyal and docile. As long as the Liberals hold that base, their party will survive and can hope to come back even if it is wiped out in most of French Quebec.
Pequophobia is why, in the six general elections since the National Assembly expanded to its present 125 seats, the Liberals have never won fewer than 48 of them.
But pequophobia alone is not enough to ensure the election of a Liberal government, especially when the PQ is not committed to holding a sovereignty referendum and its leader’s dedication to holding one has been loudly questioned by sovereignists.
In order to win an election, the Liberals need to run on other issues in addition to sovereignty.
Since 1970, when Robert Bourassa’s election promise to create 100,000 jobs in his first year as premier earned him the nickname Bob la Job, the other issue on which the Liberals have relied the most has been the economy.
It seems, however, as though the province’s unemployment rate is no longer the political indicator it used to be. No longer does the government’s popularity rise as the unemployment rate falls.
The present Liberal government did not benefit politically even when Quebec’s unemployment rate was below Ontario’s for once during the recession, thanks to the government’s fortuitously timed investment in infrastructure.
Now, with a provincial election to be held by the end of next year, the economy has slowed down – for which the Liberals might be partly to blame.
One reason for the slowdown, economist Martin Coiteux of the well-respected HEC Montréal business school wrote in January, is new provincial taxes that have seriously limited consumer purchasing power.
More recently, Coiteux wrote in these pages that he was shocked to discover that Quebec is trailing every other region of Canada in growth in family and personal incomes. If recent trends continue, he wrote, Quebecers will become “on average, the poorest citizens of Canada within a decade.”
What’s more, the study by Coiteux on which he based his article says those trends “accelerated brutally” starting in the middle of the last decade – that is, under the present Liberal government.
Charest’s Plan Nord for northern infrastructure construction, on which he appears to be pinning his hopes for another political comeback, so far appears not to have inspired Quebecers as Bourassa’s James Bay hydroelectric project did in the 1970s.
As for the overall economic outlook, one major Quebec-based financial institution, the credit-union Mouvement Desjardins, recently forecast that growth in this province would lag behind that in Ontario, in Canada as a whole and in the United States this year and next.
And it’s during that period that Charest must call the next election.
dmacpherson@montrealgazette.com
Twitter:@MacphersonGaz