It’s official: there will be no third highway link between Quebec and Lévis. Even if Minister Geneviève Guilbault still clings to a tunnel for public transit, it seems obvious that it will never see the light of day. It only remains to wonder how the whole of Quebec, but especially the national capital, could accept to play in this bad film for almost 10 years. This wacky project, which also had the disadvantage of being prohibitively expensive, was a force that sucked all the light from the political spotlight for three full election cycles. The tunnel had become a political black hole that needed to be tamed.
If we want to understand the motivations of everyone in this adventure, political science offers us two very useful concepts: the cultural war and the issue of breach.
We speak of cultural war when a political society is divided not on ideological bases, but rather on cultural bases, whether they are lifestyle or moral values. There is then no longer any space for reasonable discussion between adults in good faith. In the case of the third potential link in the Quebec City region, the commuters north of the river, who were virtually never going to use this tunnel, still supported the project massively. This could be explained by a natural empathy towards residents of the South Shore who resemble them, but especially in reaction to these urban elites on bicycles who often look down on them. We were in favor of a third motorway link more by identity than by interest.
Things could have stopped there if a political entrepreneur – here the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) – had not decided to mobilize this file as one rushes into a breach during the battle. The breach issue arises when there is a space where a party can position itself in opposition to all other partisan actors. He can then take advantage of the situation to score political points in addition to potentially creating confusion among his opponents.
The breach issue must be easy to caricature (moral issues, questions related to security, etc.), but also easy to stage using modern political communication tools. Here, the third link indeed isolated the CAQ from its adversaries in Quebec, but had many risks of logistical and financial slippages. The risk was real, but it was still too good a grenade to be left on the ground.
The bet paid off, that’s undeniable. The electoral success of the CAQ can be partly explained by this positioning, first during the Louis-Hébert partial election of 2017, then in the general elections of the following year.
Now is the time to deal with disappointments. First there will be the consequences internal to the party in power. The dramatic killing of the project discredits the ADQ wing (Éric Caire and François Bonnardel) of the CAQ, as well as one of the few former PQ still in the saddle (Bernard Drainville). Former Liberal Geneviève Guilbault finds herself in a delicate situation, but will probably manage to get away with it without too many scratches. However, she will have to negotiate with the business current (Sonia LeBel, Pierre Fitzgibbon and Christian Dubé) so close to the historic leader.
It will also be necessary to manage a legitimate discontent from about eight ridings engaged in this cultural war south of the river and the specter of a Conservative Party of Quebec ready to rush into the newly created vacuum.
Let’s finish with a few words about MP and Minister Bernard Drainville. If he had been in a former PQ life the identity spark that allowed Québec solidaire to exist over time, he could well repeat the feat by participating as a CAQ member in the emergence of a lasting electorate for the Conservative Party of Quebec. To each his own legacy. To each his own black hole.