Fête Nationale celebrations in Montreal in June. While immediate calls for independence have subsided, growing indifference about the issue could make it harder for the No side come the next referendum, one observer says.

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Graeme Hamilton - The National Post presents a week-long series about some of the most interesting ideas to emerge in the past year. Today: Has Quebec already separated?
The past year should have been a troubling one for those concerned about national unity. Quebec’s staunchly federalist Premier, Jean Charest, is on the ropes, and his Liberal Party offers no inspiring replacement. A victory by the separatist Parti Québécois in the next provincial election is increasingly likely. The PQ’s federal counterpart, the Bloc Québécois, celebrated the 20th anniversary of its first electoral victory and is solidly anchored in Ottawa. Opinion polls consistently place the Bloc as the runaway choice of French-speaking Quebecers.
And yet a political situation that 20 years ago might have put Canadians in a cold sweat and had mandarins in Ottawa planning federal-provincial summits now draws little more than a shrug. Inside Quebec, the eventual election of a PQ government, with the resulting possibility of a third sovereignty referendum, is seen as an unavoidable fact of life. Beyond Quebec’s borders, 40 years of bouncing from one national unity crisis to the next has given rise to indifference. For a variety of reasons, the once dependable bogeyman of separatism just isn’t that scary any more.
“What I find is that for better or worse, Quebec has dropped off the political map here,” said Roger Gibbins, a political scientist and president of the Calgary-based Canada West Foundation. “It’s just not part of the conversation.”
For Mr. Charest, invoking the separatist threat has been the signature move of a long political career. It worked in his passport-waving performance as a federal cabinet minister during the 1995 referendum campaign, and it helped him destroy PQ incumbent Bernard Landry and rise to the Premier’s office in 2003. But lately, the charm seems to have rubbed off. He still regularly accuses PQ leader Pauline Marois of plotting a “referendum crisis,” but the attacks do no damage. Mr. Charest and the Liberals have become associated, perhaps indelibly, with the allegations of corruption, collusion and influence peddling rocking the province’s construction industry. His government ended the year with an approval rating of just 20%, and an online petition on the National Assembly web site demanding Mr. Charest’s resignation has attracted nearly 250,000 signatures since being posted last month. “What is clear is that people don’t want to vote again for the Liberal Party if Jean Charest is the leader,” Jean-Marc Léger, president of the Léger Marketing polling firm, said. “With a level of satisfaction of 18-20% over the last few months, it is quite difficult for the Liberal Party at this moment.”
Part of the reason Quebecers remain unfazed by the prospect of a PQ government is that the party is not exactly a well-oiled separation machine these days. Amazing as it may sound, Ms. Marois is the Quebec leader facing the most immediate challenge. Hawks within her party have complained that she is not pushing independence forcefully enough, and she must pass a leadership review at a PQ convention in April. Any result below the 76% support that prompted Mr. Landry to step down in 2005 would number her days.
There are clear signs that the support enjoyed by the PQ is not a sign of enthusiasm for the party’s independence project. Polling has not uncovered a rise in support for sovereignty, which hovers around 40%. The excitement generated this fall by talk of a new, right-of-centre political party showed how hungry Quebecers are for a non-PQ alternative to the Liberals. A Léger poll in October found that if the party being discussed privately by former PQ cabinet minister François Legault materialized, it would be the first choice of voters. Joseph Facal, another former PQ minister, has since announced that he will not join Mr. Legault’s movement, making it unlikely it will get off the ground. But in a column in the Journal de Montréal, Mr. Facal expressed his desire for Quebec to move beyond the constitutional debate. “Sovereignty remains desirable, but I do not believe a winning referendum is possible in the short term, barring unforeseeable events,” he wrote. “It is counter-productive to claim otherwise.” Instead, he argued, Quebec should focus its energy on more pressing issues: public finances, education, identity and the ethics of public office-holders.
If Quebecers ever accepted that advice to push aside the old constitutional battles, they would simply be catching up with the rest of Canada. In Calgary, Mr. Gibbins said the national unity debates that dominated his academic career have evaporated. “There’s a sense of confidence that the region will continue to do well no matter what the complexion of politics might be elsewhere in the country,” he said. He imagines a PQ election victory would not even be front-page news out West, an event on a par with a U.S. presidential primary election. “I guess it’s indifference more than anything else, a belief that the big issues rotate around the economy,” he said. He doubts he could fill even a small room for a talk on the future of Quebec in Canada, and the few who do care feel powerless to influence Quebecers’ decisions. “I suspect that even those who might be quite engaged in the issue probably would not be very optimistic that we would have any leverage on it whatsoever,” he said.
Benoît Pelletier, a professor of law at the University of Ottawa and former intergovernmental affairs minister under Mr. Charest, said it is a mistake to interpret the popularity of the Bloc Québécois as a sovereigntist show of strength. Nor does it mean Quebecers have given up on Canada, he said.
Quebecers might identify with their province first, but that does not mean many of them are not proud Canadians as well. “It’s like if I were saying that Quebecers want to be Canadians, but they want to be Canadians their way,” he said. “There should be some flexibility in our system in order to let Quebecers express their own identity within Canada. At the same time, all Canadians should recognize that Quebec specificity is a great Canadian value and it should be promoted as such.”
He recognizes that within Quebec, however, there is a fatigue on both the federalist and separatist sides of the debate. Federalists have trouble sparking interest in re-engaging with Canada just as sovereigntists struggle to kindle enthusiasm for independence. “What I don’t want is for that tiredness to become resignation, because that means you have abandoned something,” Mr. Pelletier said.
Mr. Léger, the pollster, sees a danger of sleepwalking toward another unity crisis. His scenario begins with a strong Bloc showing in the next federal election, which regardless of the campaign, sovereigntists would portray as a vote of confidence. Then, if the PQ wins the next provincial election, which must be called by 2013, it is hard to conceive of them resisting a referendum. “For the PQ, sovereignty is the raison d’être, so they will try to find a way, one way or another, to start the process,” Mr. Léger said. “This time it will be more difficult for the No side to tell Quebecers they love them, to tell Quebecers that they will reform the country,” he said. “The problem is that currently nobody wants to talk about [reform], but in the near future we could be in the middle of a new crisis, and at that moment it will be too late for English Canada.”
National Post
ghamilton@nationalpost.com