The drop in voting intentions of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), more and more marked from one poll to the next, makes some hope that Prime Minister Legault will rediscover the benefit of reforming the voting system .
During the last year, he has changed his mind so often on questions that had never seemed to raise the slightest doubt in him that one begins to wonder what can still be considered definitive.
In 2018, when the CAQ, the Parti Québécois (PQ), Québec solidaire (QS) and the Green Party concluded an agreement by which they committed to establishing a proportional voting system, François Legault seemed sincerely determined to put an end to a system which he criticized for “feeding cynicism”.
Others before him had made the same commitment without keeping it, but having founded the CAQ precisely to do politics differently from the “old parties”, he swore not to follow the sad example of Justin Trudeau.
When the PQ leader at the time, Jean-François Lisée, expressed doubt about Mr. Legault’s desire to go all the way if he became prime minister, he found him “a little pocketful » to show partisanship when it was time for unity.
We know the rest. In the October 2018 elections, the current system demonstrated its qualities by allowing the CAQ to win nearly 60% of the seats with 38% of the vote. It was therefore necessary to maintain it. Initially, the idea of submitting the reform project to a referendum allowed its implementation to be postponed until 2026, before it was completely abandoned. In the elections of October 3, 2022, the CAQ won 72% of the seats with 41% of the vote.
The CAQ now risks paying the price for the dysfunction that was so advantageous to it. Projections from the Qc125 site, established from an aggregation of polls and modeling of various data, suggest a harvest of as little as 9 seats out of 125 with 22% of the vote.
The elections will only take place in two and a half years. Many things may change between now and then, but it is also possible that they will not change. With the voting intentions for which the CAQ is currently credited, a system which would generate fewer distortions would guarantee it around twenty seats. This could suddenly interest the CAQ deputies, who did not want to hear about it.
Either, the reform of the voting system does not cause more fights in the buses than when the Prime Minister justified his abandonment by their absence. The last time Léger surveyed Quebecers on the subject, in October 2022, there were nevertheless 53% who supported it. A proportion significantly higher than that of “intellectuals”, a group which, according to Mr. Legault, was the only one interested in the question.
The Prime Minister would obviously have a hard time making people believe that he himself has been thinking about the possibility of returning to this “for a while”, as he claimed in the case of political party financing. That the CAQ now finds its advantage in a reform of the voting system would not, however, take away its merits. Cynicism is not the usual path to virtue, but there are occasional accidental encounters.
Last October, the member for Jean-Lesage, the solidary Sol Zanetti, presented to the National Assembly a bill which essentially repeated the one that the Legault government itself had presented in 2019. QS sincerely believes in virtues of proportional voting, but the latter would also serve its interests by preventing its regional vote, too weak to translate into seats, from being completely lost.
More than once in the past, the PQ itself has sabotaged a reform that it had promoted. Like their CAQ successors, once in power, its deputies did not see the advantage of changing a system that had got them elected. There was, however, another objection: by making it significantly more difficult to form a majority government, a proportional voting system would also make it more difficult to hold a referendum on sovereignty.
The current popularity of the PQ is due in large part to the image of righteousness that Paul St-Pierre Plamondon projects, who could hardly back down on the commitment to reform the voting system without compromising it. But how can a referendum be held if he finds himself at the head of a minority government?
He would necessarily have to come to an agreement with QS, and the experience of recent years has shown the extreme difficulty of this. For the moment, the PQ can still extol the virtues of proportional representation, but the status quo serves its project much better.