When the Liberal Party of Quebec tried, by proposing a charter of the regions, a last-ditch effort to avoid being driven back to its last entrenchments in Montreal, a mutiny broke out within the very heart of the fortress.
With less than six months to go before the general election, the appearance of a new party that will specifically solicit the non-francophone Liberal vote was the last thing he needed. The campaign already promised to be difficult; it could now turn into a nightmare.
The former candidate for mayor of Montreal, Balarama Holness, could not have been clearer: the party he will lead, baptized Mouvement Québec, has in its sights the counties west of Montreal that the PLQ succeeded in save from the sinking of 2018.
The experience of 1989 showed that no Liberal riding is immune to an outburst of anger from the English-speaking community when it feels betrayed by the party it has always seen as its protector against what she perceives as the tyranny of the French-speaking majority.
That year, the Égalité party had its four deputies elected where the PLQ had won large majorities in the previous elections: D’Arcy-McGee (21,672 votes), Jacques-Cartier (20,404 votes), Notre-Dame -de-Grâce (17,726 votes) and Westmount (15,083 votes).
Robert Bourassa knew perfectly well that there would be a price to pay for the adoption of Bill 178, which maintained the rule of French unilingualism in commercial signage, against a judgment of the Supreme Court. The three English-speaking ministers in his cabinet had resigned with a bang. Backed by the support of a large proportion of Francophones, the Liberals had nevertheless elected 92 deputies.
This time, the PLQ will not be able to count on Francophones, as evidenced by the meager 7% collected during the recent by-election in Marie-Victorin.
Without Anglophone support, ridings outside the West Island also become vulnerable. Saint-Henri-Sainte-Anne, for example, where the leader of the party, Dominique Anglade, won with a majority of 4,224 votes in 2018. Or Marquette, where that of Enrico Ciccone was 4,026 votes.
In the municipal elections last November, Mr. Holness won only 7.23% of the vote for the post of mayor, but the party he created, Mouvement Montréal, exceeded 15% — even 20% — in some boroughs where a significant proportion of non-French speakers reside.
At the end of March, the president of the Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN), Marlene Jennings, said that the creation of a new party “could be devastating for the PLQ”, which “seems to have forgotten its raison d’être”.
Already, according to the latest projections from the Québec125 site, Liberal representation in the National Assembly could drop from 27 to 17 seats next fall. This without taking into account the arrival of this new player.
Running two hares at once always gives the same results. The Liberal leader was wrong to believe that she could compete with the CAQ on the ground of nationalism. His blunders in the debate on Bill 96 on language, as in that on secularism, ultimately had the effect of dissatisfying both sides.
At last November’s congress, the linguistic file had been deliberately set aside to prevent the divisions from bursting into the open, but they have only worsened since then.
LaFontaine MP Marc Tanguay only succeeded in making a fool of himself with his crude attempt to dust off the referendum bogeyman last week. Anglophones, who read the polls like everyone else, could only be insulted to be taken for suitcases.
The spectacle offered by the PLQ becomes more pathetic every day. By now seeking to portray herself as a victim of Prime Minister Legault’s paternalism, Ms.me Anglade herself gave the impression of no longer knowing which saint to devote herself to. Mr. Legault will probably never win a feminist prize, but the difficulties of the PLQ are due to many other things.
Since becoming leader, she has above all succeeded in transforming her party into a weather vane. After noticing the uselessness of trying to overtake QS on her left, now she wants to give back to the PLQ the image of developer who had once made her fortune.
All that remains is to see what new acrobatics she will indulge in to present a constitutional position that will reconcile the affirmation of Quebec’s specificity and the defense of Canadian unity without giving the impression that it was by Elvis Gratton.