Jacques Parizeau had uttered a real cry from the heart in 1989 when no journalist had seen fit to show up at the press conference he had called on a beautiful Friday afternoon. “I exist, me too,” he had launched, furious and humiliated.
The episode had no doubt been mortifying for Mr. Parizeau, but the Parti Québécois (PQ) at the time still had about thirty deputies and formed the official opposition. Its leader had every day the opportunity to address his questions to Premier Bourassa and to say all the bad things he thought of his policies.
Now that the PQ has been relegated to the rank of third opposition group, with only three deputies, the “right to exist” demanded by Paul St-Pierre Plamondon takes on a completely different meaning.
Everyone recognizes that the distribution of seats in the National Assembly does not reflect the will that Quebecers expressed in the elections of October 3rd. In the absence of a reform of the voting system, as promised by the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), the sharing of resources and speaking time between the opposition parties should not lead to further aggravation of the distortions, but rather to mitigate its effects.
Negotiations between the parties constitute a kind of ritual that returns with more or less tension with each new legislature, but it has taken on the appearance of a rat race this time around.
Since the Liberal Party (PLQ) forms the official opposition, no one disputes that each of its 19 MNAs receives a proportionally larger share than those of the other parties, but granting 9 times more money and 14 times more questions to the PLQ that in the PQ, while the Liberals received fewer votes, clearly constitutes an inequity.
The rule that requires a party to have won 12 seats or 20% of the vote to be officially recognized was devised at a time when two-partyism was practically the norm, and parliamentarism is an area where the weight of tradition is particularly heavy.
Jurisprudence is of little help when conditions have changed. Never had three opposition parties obtained substantially the same percentage of votes. The multi-party system has obviously taken hold, and the emergence of the Conservative Party of Quebec risks complicating matters even further in four years. We must take note of this new reality.
Of course, presenting oneself as a victim to whom one offers only “shot” is part of the PQ’s negotiation strategy. He estimates that $800,000 is the “bare minimum” without which he would not be able to fulfill his obligations adequately, whereas he would be offered $495,000. This seems very little since each of its three deputies will have to take charge of more files than their liberal and solidarity colleagues.
In politics, the “right to exist” also requires a minimum of visibility, and the period of oral questions in the National Assembly is by far the main showcase available to an opposition party. The PQ is only offered 5 questions per cycle of 100, which would not ensure that he asks at least one per week, whereas he is rather asking for one per day.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon attributed the deadlock in the negotiations to the intransigence of the government parliamentary leader, Simon Jolin-Barrette, while the interim leader of the PLQ, Marc Tanguay, criticizes his PQ counterpart for negotiating in the public square.
In reality, it is as if the other parties considered the PQ as an anomaly that the last elections should have settled. Before the start of the campaign, polls and observers predicted that Pascal Bérubé would be the last of the Mohicans, pending the complete extinction of the party, but things turned out differently. In the absence of a disappearance, we could at least pass the muzzle to the PQ.
Prime Minister François Legault had already been presenting Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois as his main opponent for months, knowing full well that the program of Québec solidaire (QS) seemed too radical in the eyes of the majority of voters to represent a real danger. Sharing the spoils of the PQ between QS and the CAQ could only benefit the latter.
In a threesome, Mr. Legault can present himself as a bulwark against the wokism of QS and the flat-ventrist federalism of the PLQ, but he will never be able to compete with the PQ in the defense of French and identity. Quebec. If ever a wind of nationalism were to rise, it could well inflate the sails of the PQ.