It was the week of Denis Coderre and Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, whose meeting in the corridors of the National Assembly reminded the most nostalgic of the return of referendum polarization and the fights between Captain Quebec and Captain Canada.
But the two politicians are in very different situations.
Denis Coderre would like to return to business as leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec and he is going about it with his good old method: a populism that would allow him to make any changes. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has a bit of the opposite problem: he is in the process of being overwhelmed by his own success and he is a prisoner of his own rigidity.
In its campaign for the leadership of the Parti Québécois, PSPP had a strategy which essentially aimed to bring the old PQ members home. And it worked very well.
First, find the path to a symbolic victory by abolishing the oath to the king. Then, take the known recipes of the PQ: the budget of year 1, a criticism from the threshold Canadian immigration and the promise to hold a referendum during the first mandate of a Parti Québécois government – always popular with PQ activists.
By following its game plan – and also thanks to the repeated errors of the Legault government –, PSPP and the PQ found themselves in first place in voting intentions and therefore in the position of government in waiting.
But what sticks with the electorate is the promise of a referendum on sovereignty in the first mandate of a PQ government.
According to the latest Léger poll, support for sovereignty does not follow the popularity of the PQ. Only 35% of Quebecers would vote Yes in a referendum1 – a “popular consultation”, the PQ now says as if that were to change something. For the record, this would be a more bitter defeat than the first referendum in 1980.
What is even more annoying is that a quarter (24%) of those who say they want to vote PQ would vote No in the referendum. At Québec Solidaire, the other officially sovereignist party – but less and less in practice – 59% of respondents would vote No. Note also that 32% of CAQ voters would vote Yes.
But in the end, the PSPP’s PQ would be far from the mark, even without considering the cooling effect that the promise of a referendum could have.
When we cannot even count on a majority among French speakers (43% for, 47% against), it is difficult to see how we can even think of a referendum which would be anything other than a rejection of the sovereignist project by a third party. generation of Quebecers.
The presumed candidate for leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party, Denis Coderre, has the opposite PSPP problem. He has always had only one credo, populism, which he defines today as follows: “You have to adjust to people and not the opposite. »
Which allows him to now be in favor of the third link in Quebec, which is all the more convenient since he would think, if he became leader, of course, of running in the Quebec region, on the Rive -South, where said third link is most popular.
For a man who declared that the PLQ was too far to the left and who describes himself as having “the portfolio on the right”, it seems that the billions intended for the third link and which will have pushed back the CAQ government do not weigh very heavily.
But what is most remarkable is his about-face on Law 21 on the wearing of religious symbols, which he fought while he was mayor of Montreal.
At the time, he did not rule out challenging the law in court and considered using the status of metropolis to evade this law. In any case, he said, “it is not up to the government of Quebec to choose my employees,” he said in a parliamentary committee.
Bill 21, he said at the time, would have the effect of “institutionalizing employment discrimination.” Today, Mr. Coderre believes the opposite and that it would be a good thing to use the derogation clause for five more years to shield Bill 21 from review by the courts.
“I am a practicing Catholic, but I believe in the secular state. It’s not my place to dictate. As a society, we have chosen to have a secular State,” he declared to justify his about-face.
Except that, as recently as last August, Mr. Coderre estimated in a tweet that the shortage of teachers was attributable to Law 21. Have we checked with “those who wore a religious sign (such as a turban for example) […] if they were calculated in the batch of those who are missing??? », he asked.
It was at the end of August. Today he claims the opposite. Mr. Coderre says he was the unfortunate victim of not one, but two hacks of his past interventions on Twitter and Facebook.
Too bad, because if we looked, we would have found other populist gems.
1. Consult the survey conducted by Léger