From the revival committee of the Liberal Party of Quebec, we expected a serious self-criticism of recent years where the PLQ lost its connection with French-speakers and a broad perspective on major directions for the future. Instead, the committee will have developed a detailed electoral platform.
For older people, it looks strangely like a film we’ve already seen. It was called the Beige Book.
Shortly after the victory of the Parti Québécois in 1976 and as we moved towards a referendum on sovereignty for the first time, everyone noted that the PLQ no longer had any constitutional platform.
Their new leader, Claude Ryan, an intellectual of high caliber who had the faults of his qualities, undertook to write a long, very detailed document – under a beige cover, hence his nickname – on the constitutional reform he hoped for. It was, in a way, a federalist program for the 1980 referendum.
But instead of sticking to broad principles, Mr. Ryan went into minutiae. This allowed the Prime Minister of Canada and de facto leader of the federalists, Pierre Trudeau, to reject these proposals – on the modalities and ignoring the backstory – while the ink was not yet dry.
During the electoral campaign that followed, in 1981, the outright rejection of the Beige Book contributed to the defeat of Claude Ryan’s Liberals.
This long reminder is useful to understand how the Consultation and Reflection Committee on the relaunch of the Liberal Party of Quebec is a conscientious and studious exercise, which could well meet the same fate as the Beige Book.
The proposals are a clever mix of proposals eternally taken up, but always rejected, and one-off actions which would have their place in an electoral platform for elections in a few weeks.
Among the “eternal” proposals, we note the replacement of the Senate with a Chamber of the provinces, a proposal from the 1970s and 1980s which never had enough support to even be seriously considered.
There is also the project for a Quebec Constitution, which has excited generations of constitutionalists, but without ever going further than scholarly articles. Even if everyone recognizes that this is an exclusive jurisdiction of Quebec and that it does not have to ask permission from anyone.
We can also talk about the single income tax declaration, the establishment of a preferential voting method, a “real industrial strategy” or the guaranteed minimum income, now renamed the “activity” minimum income. All ideas that have been recycled from election campaign to election campaign without ever seeing the light of day, which means that the electorate is now jaded and simply no longer believes in them.
We could also talk about the recurring proposal for a major summit on the economic and social future of Quebec, to which we add the environmental term to be in tune with the times.
But what is most surprising are the very current proposals which, even if they are interesting, could have the effect of placing any new Liberal leader in a straightjacket.
Just one example: the committee proposes merging the two main economic issues of the moment, inflation and the housing shortage, into a Inflation Protection and Housing Affordability Act.
This will force the new leader either to unreservedly endorse the work of the committee without being able to put his own mark on it, or to repudiate it. An exercise which risks confusing the message and “losing” valuable interventions.
An electoral campaign is essentially a leader presenting a vision and articulating, in short, a limited number of major commitments from his party’s program. But the next Liberal leader will inevitably have to be called upon to compare his own proposals to those of the recovery committee. An exercise he would certainly prefer to do without.
On the other hand, even if it does not say it explicitly, the committee understands that to win against the Coalition Avenir Québec, it will be necessary to have progressive proposals. The austerity of the Charest and Couillard years above all left the memory of human chains in front of schools, even if the accounting books were in good order.
Likewise, the committee warns the PLQ against the idea of killing certain useful initiatives such as the regional conferences of elected officials, just because they emanated from the former government. The CREs would rather be called regional consultation centers, but everyone understands the message.
But, unfortunately, what emerges most from the final report of the recovery committee is that the Liberal Party of Quebec is still unable to escape a certain nostalgia for the time when it was enough for Jean Charest to say the word ” referendum” to obtain three consecutive mandates.
He knows that those days are over. But he has not yet found another place on the new political spectrum.