The leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime, faces (in turn) the discontent of the “antivax” with whom he flirted during the pandemic of COVID-19, but not only them.
Under his leadership, the PCQ won 12.91% of the votes in the last general election, compared to 1.46% of the votes four years earlier, which notably guarantees it an annual allocation of some $1.4 million from the part of the Quebec state. But, he failed to win either of the 125 seats in the National Assembly. And there are many unhappy people.
A few of them will be seen and heard at a hotel in Drummondville on Saturday. The staff of the PCQ intends to take stock of the last election campaign, but without plunging those present into a psychodrama.
Growls of the “conspirators”
Éric Duhaime has established himself as the champion of people angry at the severity of health measures even before being elected head of the PCQ in the spring of 2021. He used a discourse based on free choice – the free choice to receive the vaccine and its suite of “boosters” or not for example – to which more than one Quebecer quickly subscribed.
The former radio host, however, refrained from formally accrediting (or discrediting) the conspiracy ideas that obsess some opponents of health measures… at least for a while.
The Conservative leader dispelled the vagueness in early September, at the request of journalists who did not leave him alone during the election campaign.
He “recognizes [t] the democratic result of the 2020 American elections” thanks to which Joe Biden obtained the keys to the White House. He sees “absolutely no” connection between 5G, “neither the chips nor Bill Gates”, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Éric Duhaime swept away one by one the main conspiracy theories that have been in vogue in recent years.
Some have still not recovered, finding nothing better, almost a month after the election, than to break the sugar on the backs of reporters and their “silly” questions.
Éric Duhaime’s team again took the opposite view of the conspiracy theorists this week by acknowledging the defeat of each of the candidates who ran for the votes under the banner of the PCQ – including that of Olivier Dumais, who barely obtained 202 votes less than his CAQ opponent, Luc Provençal, in the riding of Beauce-Nord.
There, the figurehead of the Quebec complosher Alexis Cossette-Trudel and his subscribers did not forgive him. “He must call for an investigation into the election. We are laughed at. If that doesn’t happen, I don’t really feel like renewing my membership card. There is a limit to making us laugh, ”wrote Chantale Audet in the Facebook Group “Let’s support Éric Duhaime, leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ)” after watching the video Back to Fraud, by Alexis Cossette-Trudel. Streamed on a second-rate web platform, the video which opens with images of former US President Donald Trump waving his fist and fighter jets firing missiles has been viewed more than 50,000 times.
During the election campaign, he said he would accept the election result, whatever it was. He does absolutely no mileage on it.
Éric Duhaime repeats in all tones that the PCQ, which obtained the support of 530,786 electors on October 3, is simply a victim of the electoral distortion caused by the current first-past-the-post system, but nothing do.
“During the election campaign, he said he would accept the election result, whatever it was. He does absolutely no mileage on it, ”says professor at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at the University of Sherbrooke David Morin. That said, “the anger, the anti-sanitary measures discourse, the conspiracy had nevertheless been able to mobilize an important militant base for the PCQ – which is not only conspiratorial. It is nevertheless important to say it since it is much broader than that. It also explains today why some of the conspirators are very dissatisfied with the results. [du scrutin du 3 octobre dernier] because of the PCQ’s lack of representation in the National Assembly of Quebec—that’s another debate—and because of the leader’s posture, and so on. vis-à-vis more radical discourse”, adds the holder of the UNESCO Chair in the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism (UNESCO-PREV).
Nearly half (49%) of Conservative sympathizers adhered to conspiracy theories compared to 31% of Liberal sympathizers and 28.7% of PQ sympathizers, according to a study by the UNESCO-PREV Chair published last June.
growls of the realists
Blogger Joanne Marcotte, with whom Éric Duhaime founded the Réseau Liberté-Québec (RLQ) in 2010, criticizes the PCQ for having flirted with “cuckoo clocks” for too long.
She urges the PCQ to take up the torch of “individual and economic freedom” and “good common sense” in the management of public affairs, while defending a “unifying” nationalism that rings well in the ears of not only worried French speakers. of the future of their language, but also of Anglophones and allophones. “Eric’s entourage currently […] is a little too focused in my opinion on “caribouism””, she also argued at the microphone of the show May Live this week, inviting Éric Duhaime to revamp his team by the end of the year.
Activists consulted by The duty find that the PCQ has deployed too much energy in courting Anglophones by repeating in Canada’s two official languages that it wants to repeal the Act respecting the official and common language of Quebec, French (Bill 96) and not enough in the constituencies likely to switch from blue-CAQ to blue-PCQ… where Bill 96 is popular.
Others are angry with Éric Duhaime for having “mismanaged” the case of municipal taxes that he had been slow to pay, which broke out in the middle of the election campaign.
As the Drummondville post-election meeting approached, CHOI Radio X host Dominic Mavais — who developed a bond with Éric Duhaime — reminded his PCQ activist listeners that “complacency is a trap” .
With Isabelle Porter