Party Behaviour in Quebec: Ownership, Contagion, and Multi-dimensionality of the National Question
Éric Bélanger
McGill University
Paper presented at the 2014 EPOP conference, University of Edinburgh,
12-14 September.
1. Introduction
While the national question is very much on the agenda in Scotland ever since the election of a first SNP government at Holyroodin 2007, in Quebec the issue has experienced two decades of slowly declining salience following the 1995 referendum defeat. In some ways, the record-low electoral support recently received by Quebec’s two most prominent separatist parties – the Parti Québécois (PQ) in the subnational election of 2014 (25.4%) and the Bloc Québécois (BQ) in the statewide election of 2011 (23.4%within the province, representing only 6.1% of the Canada-wide vote) – can be interpreted as a symptom of a larger mobilization problem that faces the nationalist movement in Quebec at the beginning of the 21st century.
Yet, political parties in Quebec still compete on the issue. They still talk regularly about the national question, even if for some of them it is to say that Quebecers need to focus on priorities other than independence for the time being. Seeking or preserving Quebec’s autonomy within the Canadian union remains a fundamental aspect of the parties’ discourse in the province. The resilience of the national question as an electoral issue in Quebec is understandable. It has underpinned the substate party system ever since the socioeconomic and political modernization of the province starting in the 1960s (Bélanger and Nadeau 2009; Pelletier 2012). With the advent of the PQ, the first serious political party advocating independence, the question has polarized the party system around two poles: “sovereigists” gravitating towards the PQ and “federalists” mainly represented by the PartiLibéral du Québec (PLQ). In other words, the issue has structured the party system for so long, it is no wonder why it is difficult for the parties to get rid of it or to simply stop addressing it. Some of them might even believethat they still benefit from the issue in that it allows them to keep their core supporters mobilized. Even at the state level, the question of the defense of Quebec’s interests continues to structure the competition between federal parties in the province, especially since the arrival of the BQ in the 1993 election (Johnston 2008). Almost all statewide parties feel the need to propose one form or another of collaborative approach to Quebecers while the BQ continually tries to keep the idea of political independence, or the very least autonomy, on the agenda.
The purpose of this paper is to understand to extent to which the national question still dominates party behaviour in Quebec, and to analyse the ways in which substate and statewide parties articulate their views on the national question and on its various dimensions. In doing so, we pay special attention to whether nationalist parties act as owners of the territorial issue and whether the other parties’ discourse is contaminated by this issue, in part as a reaction to the behaviour of nationalist parties. We also pay attention to the behaviour of parties at the two levels of government, that is, the substate (provincial) and state (federal) levels.
The main source of data for this paper comes in the form of semi-structured elite interviews with senior party officials. The interviews, which were based on a series of questions organized around the three themes of the national question – the constitutional issue, the identity issue and territorial interests – were asked consistently of each participant involved. Interviews were conducted between February and December 2013with at least one member from the four most important parties on each level of government in Quebec. This included Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) for the Parti Québécois, PartiLibéral du Québec, Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) and Québec Solidaire (QS); in addition to Quebec-elected Members of Parliament (MPs) in Ottawa for the Bloc Québécois, Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) and New Democratic Party (NDP), for a total of nine interviews. (To help keep intact the anonymity of our interviewees, we use the masculine throughout the paper when we report their words even though we interviewed both men and women party representatives.)
We first propose a brief account of the historical development of the substate party system in Quebec and of its statewide counterpart, leading up to the 2011-14 period that is the focus of this Scotland-Quebec research project. We then assess the question of issue ownership and contagion in the context of Quebec politics. This is followed by a contemporary analysis of the three dimensions of the national question based on our interview data: party positions on the constitutional issue, on Quebec identity, and on regional interests. We complete this analysis by examining the multi-level dimension of the national question debate in Quebec. We summarize our main findings regarding party behaviour in Quebec in the paper’s concluding section.
2. Overview of the “National Question” in Quebec Politics
Theroots of the contemporary substate party system in Quebec go back to the 1960s and the rise of the national question that accompanied this period of socioeconomic development in Quebec (otherwise known as the Quiet Revolution). In 1968, former PLQ member René Lévesque created a brand new party, the Parti Québécois, aimed at realizing the independence of Quebec. Upon taking power in 1976, the PQ ended a period of realignment in the province’s party system (Lemieux, Blais and Gilbert 1970). The new two-party system would be based around two clear alternatives: the secessionist PQ and the federalist PLQ. As Premier, Lévesque was able in 1980 to hold a first referendum on independence, asking Quebecers whether they agreed to let the government negotiate a new political and economic partnership with the rest of Canada – what Lévesque called “sovereignty-association.” In the end, the “Yes” campaign managed to secure only 40% of support in the referendum.
The PLQ came back to power in 1985. Despite the referendum defeat, the national question was still very much at the forefront during Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government’s years. In 1982, the federal LPC government of Pierre Trudeau repatriated the Canadian constitution from London without the Quebec government’s consent. The grievances that this decision created in Quebec allowed Brian Mulroney’s Conservative party to return to power in Ottawa in 1984 with the promise of reopening constitutional talks so as to satisfy the Quebec government’s demands. Premier Bourassa was thus able to negotiate a new constitutional agreement with the rest of Canada that would satisfy Quebec’s demand of being formally recognized as a “distinct society” within Canada, a new official status that had the potential of granting the province additional or special powers. Called the Meech Lake Accord, this agreement was signed in 1987 but needed to be ratified by each of the provincial legislatures within the next three years.
By the deadline of June 1990 the Meech Lake Accord was still missing ratification by two of the ten provincial legislatures, and so it became null. The failure of the Accord sparked a rise in independence support among Quebecers, with public opinion polls reporting clear majority support for this constitutional option between 1990 and 1992 (Pinard, Bernier and Lemieux 1997; Yale and Durand2011). A second constitutional agreement, the Charlottetown Accord, was rejected in a pan-Canadian referendum in October 1992. By then, the path seemed cleared for a return of the PQ to power in Quebec and for the holding of a second referendum on independence. This is exactly what happened in 1994-95. The referendum battle of October 1995 was closely fought, almost resulting in a draw: 49.4% of Quebecers supported the option of “sovereignty-partnership.” The PQ was re-elected in the 1998 provincial election but started to experience a slow decline in its electoral support in the years that followed. It briefly came back to power, with only a minority of seats, during the period under study (2012-14) before being voted out of office in the April 2014 election, receiving its lowest support since 1970.
As can be seen, the PLQ clearly flirted with autonomy during the 1980s up till the spike in independence support that followed the failure of Meech Lake. By then, Premier Bourassa had backed down on autonomy but this decision left many nationalist members within the PLQ deeply dissatisfied. In 1994 a splinter group decided to create a new party, the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ), dedicated to pursuing Quebec’s political autonomy in place of the PLQ. Over the years the ADQ came to take a number of controversial stances on the questions of immigrant integration (arguing for a stricter model) and governance (pushing for cutbacks in Quebec’s welfare state and questioning the interventionist model of economic development). After several years of ups and downs (see Bélanger and Nadeau 2009) the ADQ finally decided in 2012 to merge with the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) newly created by former PQ member François Legault.
Together with the PLQ, PQ and CAQ, a fourth party is currently being represented in Quebec’s National Assembly, namely Québec Solidaire (QS). This party was created in 2006 as a reaction to what it perceived as a drift towards the socioeconomic right within the Quebec party system, including within the traditionally progressive PQ. While QS is in favour of Quebec’s secession, its main axis of competition thus remains the left-right dimension of politics.
The national question has not evaded statewide parties either. As underlined above, during the 1980s the Progressive Conservative party (renamed Conservative Party of Canada in 2004) has sought to respond positively to the province of Quebec’s constitutional demands but ultimately failed on that goal. Following the 1980 referendum the Liberals (LPC) have shown some willingness to renew Canadian federalism although the end result of such reform, the 1982 Constitution Act, did not satisfy the government of Quebec (who refused to endorse the Liberals’ repatriation project). Since then, the LPC’s stance on the national question has mostly been a non-accommodative, or at best a dismissive, one. For its part, the New Democratic Party (NDP) has shown openness to Quebec’s demands for more autonomy. Although the NDP has never been into power and thus has yet to be in a position to act on this issue, this more accommodative stance has nonetheless informed the party’s discourse over the years. The fourth and final competitor in the state-level party system is the Bloc Québécois. Ever since its creation in 1990 as a direct reaction to the Meech Lake Accord collapse, the BQ has acted as the owner of the national question in Ottawa, as much promoting independence as defending Quebec’s regional interests in the Canadian Parliament (Noël 1994; Young and Bélanger 2008).
3. Issue Ownership and the Contagion Effect
Our analysis of party behaviour in this project is guided by specific theoretical expectations about the competitive behaviour of parties. The first two of these hypotheses need to be addressed in the context of the historical evolution of the party systems that we have just started to describe in the previous section. To recall, the first hypothesis stipulates that nationalist parties “own” the national question in substate politics; and the second hypothesis suggests that nationalist parties have a contagion effect on other parties in the substate party system. Does the Quebec case conform to these expectations?
To a large extent, it does. Ever since its creation in 1968, the PQ has acted as the owner of the national question issue. The nationalist party has acted as the clear catalyst, to the extent that the two-party competition at the substate level in Quebec has realigned from a PLQ-Union Nationale[1] competition to a PLQ-PQ one polarized around the national question, and particularly around its constitutional dimension. The new PLQ-PQ duopoly that emerged during the 1970s is still more or less in place today, although the PQ has started to show signs of weakness over the past decade and a number of new parties have appeared on the provincial scene (but have yet to really break through electorally speaking).
In addition, it can be argued that the PQ has led to a contagion of the other subnational parties, but more so during the periods surrounding the two independence referendums. By the end of the 1980s the PLQ had very much become an autonomist party. But, when faced with the failure of constitutional talks, the PLQ stopped pushing for more autonomy, a decision that led to the defection of its more nationalistmembers who went on to create the ADQ (which would eventually merge with the CAQ). In more recent years the PQ continued to be a catalyst, with the newly created QS and Option Nationale[2]acting as sovereignist alternatives to the PQ.
At the state level, there is less competition for party ownership of the national question, and there is less contagion as well. There is one clear nationalist party in the federal party system, the Bloc Québécois. The BQ’s ownership of the national question is less contested that what we observe at the substate level with the PQ. In fact, the competition at the state level has revolved more around the dimension of territorial interests; and it has actually been the case long before the arrival of the BQ on the federal scene. For most of the 20th century, the LPC has claimed to be the best defender of French-Canadians’ interests in Ottawa. And indeed, Quebecers have regularly voted in masse for the Liberals before the adoption of the 1982 Constitution Act. After 1982, this block support shifted over to the Conservatives as a reaction to the Trudeau government’s repatriation of the constitution and the willingness of Conservative leader Brian Mulroney to accommodate Quebec’s demands by negotiating a new constitutional act. Following the failure of those negotiations, Quebecers shifted again their support, this time to the newly created BQ. The Bloc Québécois has been dominant in the province until the 2011 election, where Quebecers decided to abandon it and vote massively in favour of the NDP, in a vote that seemed more driven by left-right considerations than by the national question itself (Fournier et al. 2013).
In sum, while there was no real nationalist catalyst in the federal party system until 1990, the debate over the national question at the substate level nonetheless spilled over to the statewide party system to a limited extent, although it mostly involved the issues of autonomy and regional interests. Once a nationalist issue owner appeared on the scene, its contagion effect remained limited in the sense that its existence led some statewide parties (the NDP and, to a lesser extent, the CPC) to defend a more accommodative approach towards Quebec, although only the NDP appears (timidly) open to the idea of more autonomy for the province.
The next four sections directly put to the test our third and last hypothesis which posits that the national question has become a multiple-ordering dimension, which supersedes and structures other cleavages in the party system. They will also allow us to flesh out a bit more the various parties’ current stances on the national question within the Quebec context.
4. The Constitutional Issue
The first dimension of the national question that deserves attention is the position of the various political parties on thecurrent and future constitutional status of Quebec. Is there disagreement (or polarization) among the parties’ stances on this aspect? Or does it take on characteristics of a valence issue?
On surface, there is no denying the fact that there is a clear polarization among substate parties on the question of whether the province of Quebec should separate from the rest of Canada. As the PQ representative states: “L’objectif du Parti Québécois, sa raison d’être, c’est de faire l’indépendance politique du Québec” (interview, 15 August 2013). On the other hand, the Liberal MNA claims thathis party “demeure une option fédéraliste à l’intérieur de l’Assemblée nationale, alors notre préférence est toujours de maintenir le lien avec le Canada” (interview, 13 May 2013). The latter even goes as far as saying that his involvement in politics is primarily motivated by the threat to the Canadian federation’s integrity posed by the PQ. Between these two poles, the other parties navigate less easily. While QS sides with the PQ’s pro-independence option, its representative is quick to add that the party’s preference is for the maintenance of an association between the two states, with the sharing of a number of core responsibilities (currency and defence) and possibly the creation of some form of supranational representational institution. For its part, the CAQ refuses to take a position on the constitutional future of Quebec, with one representative stating that this lack of position actually constitutes the “founding axis” of their new party (interview, 22 February 2013). This particular take stems from the CAQ’s view that the national question in Quebec has reached a temporary dead end; so Quebecers ought to start dedicating their time and energy to other policy priorities.
That said, if one leaves aside the issue of whether Quebec ought to separate or not, one finds that there is a relatively large consensus among Quebec’s substate parties when it comes to the broader constitutional aspect of autonomy, with all parties seeking to increase powers. Put differently, while there are various positions taken by the parties on whether separation per se should be sought, all substate parties are in favour of more autonomy. While in power between 2012-14, the PQ’s strategy in that sense even had a name, that of gouvernancesouverainiste. The PQ representativedefined sovereignist governance as follows: “à défaut de pouvoir faire l’indépendance, on va exercer la souveraineté provinciale que nous avons au maximum … le Québec est déjà souverain sur un certain nombre de points alors il faut occuper nos champs de compétence, l’espace de souveraineté que nous avons déjà.” The PQ’s turn in power was too brief for the party to really put this doctrine into practice, but sovereignist governance is the principle that guided the PQ’s ideas and strategies under Pauline Marois’ tenure.