I'll take "utterly predictable developments in Quebec politics" for $200, Alex

So, André Boisclair has handed in his resignation. I, for one, am decidedly unsurprised by this development. A headless chicken could have predicted that the PQ would ditch Boisclair after his poor performance in the election. Unfortunately, Boisclair himself was woefully incapable of deciphering the bleeding obvious, and is now forced to leave under a dark cloud of pettiness and party infighting.

What should prove to be much more interesting is how this will shake up federal politics. The BQ has hardly been shining in the federal polls, and I rather suspect that if popular leader Gilles Duceppe departs - as expected - for the provincial arena, the party's popularity will take yet another hit. I fear that this is likely to be good news for the Harper Conservatives, given Dion's failure to revitalize the party's support in Quebec - or indeed to do anything other than talk about the environment.

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Quebec election - The Morning After

If I could meet them in person, I'd have some harsh words to say to the poll clerks and returning officers in Sherbrooke - thanks to them, I was up about an hour and a half longer than I needed to be, hitting "refresh results" every few minutes to find out if Jean Charest was indeed, as CBC was claiming, defeated in his own riding. I've been groggy all day as a result. As a spectator sport, last night was awesome. I haven't been so rivetted by a leaderboard since the 1995 referendum.

Greater (and more alert) pundits than I have already weighed in with most of what I would say about the significance of the election, but I'll sum up what I think are the most important bits:

1) By no means does the third place finish of the PQ mean that the sovereignty movement is dead. All three parties campaigned on their ability to win concessions from Ottawa, and Dumont's "autonomiste" option is sovereignty-lite. Voters were prepared to punish both the Liberals and the PQ, but this means that the issue is temporarilly dormant, ready to be awakened when Mario Dumont eventually makes a demand that Stephen Harper won't concede, and is then accused of having made a "grave insult" to Quebec.

2) André Boisclair's career as PQ leader, despite his protestations to the contrary, is over. The PQ does not treat failed leaders well, and will seek to regain its rural support, and perhaps rebuild its bridges with the left. Maybe Lisette Lapointe (Jacques Parizeau's wife) wants to make PQ leadership a family affair?

3) Quebec Solidaire and the Greens did surprisingly well in Eastern and Western Montreal respectively. If I were Daniel Turp, I'd be thanking my various gods today.

4) Mario Dumont is now in the driver's seat, and in an ideal position for future growth. He narrowly dodged becoming the Bob Rae of Quebec provincial politics, and will instead have some time to break in his new crop of MNAs, and figure out who the wingnuts are.

5) It's going to be a painful few years on the federal-provincial relations front. My best guess is that, having extracted concessions on the equalization front, the Charest-Dumont duo will now go after tax points, and call on Ottawa to lower federal taxes to make more room for Quebec to raise more of its own revenue. The big question is whether Stephen Harper thinks that every ADQ seat is a potential federal Conservative district. Personally, I have my doubts that everyone who voted ADQ is a conservative - there were other factors at play, like protest voting, nationalism, and anti-Montreal sentiment - but if Harper thinks that decentralization and dancing the Jean et Mario two-step will win him votes, he may go a long way indeed to meet their demands.

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Who will win the Quebec election?

There are times when I'm really glad that I'm a historian as opposed to a political scientist or a journalistic pundit. My job entails looking at an election campaign years after it is over, examining various pieces of evidence, and only then explaining why it turned out the way it did. It's a somewhat less daunting challenge than reading the tea leaves in a three-way race and attempting to predict who will win.

But because I like to dabble, here's my best guess. It will be a minority government. I suspect that Charest will come out with the most seats, but not by a large margin. This will make Dumont the effective kingmaker, and I suspect he will prop up the Liberals for as long as it is convenient for him.

There is not a minority government scenario that I can envision where André Boisclair plays an active role in making or supporting policy. There is simply too much distance between Boisclair and Charest on issues of federalism, and between Boisclair and Dumont on issues of social policy to make a coalition involving the PQ viable. So even if Boisclair wins the most seats, if he fails to claim a majority, he is unlikely to form the government, and if he tries to, it will fall at the first budget.

What does this mean, in a broader sense? It means a continuation of demands for decentralization of powers and fiscal space from Ottawa to Quebec City, coupled with some right-wing policy shifts. I don't Quebec is in for a Mike Harris-style revolution, but there may be some selective moves away from the state-centric policy that has characterized Quebec's political economy since the 1960s.

What's that rumbling sound you hear? That would be the sound of the campaign buses of Boisclair's rivals revving up for an impending leadership race.

Of course, all the pollsters could be wrong, and we could see a majority government tomorrow. We'll all just have to wait and see!

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Quebec election - Post-debate thoughts

I managed to watch about 75% of the leaders' debate last night on TVA - for whatever reason, RDI is not part of the basic cable package in Atlantic Canada, and Radio-Canada didn't feel it necessary to show the debate out here!

I did not expect great things from Jean Charest, given the rough first term that he has had, and his two great failures to do much about his promises to reduce wait times and lower taxes. That being said, he generally seemed to be calm and controlled, and on top of his dossiers. He is really playing up the "look what a constructive partner in Confederation can get out of Ottawa" card. Although he was the main focus of the attacks last night, he fared reasonably well. It wasn't a particularly dynamic performance, but it won't hurt him either, I suspect.

I have never had the opportunity to hear André Boisclair speak for more than a brief sound bite. I was rather surprised at how reserved and quiet he appeared to be, fading into the background, and under the volume of the other two leaders. His exchanges with Mario Dumont were the most interesting, with Boisclair continually repeating the same pointed questions at Dumont, which Dumont tried to dodge. I was not particularly surprised, but was amused, at how Boisclair only spoke of a referendum once during his opening statement, and then it was almost as an afterthought at the end of a statement, with his voice dropping as he delivered that part of his speech. Like Charest, I don't know that Boisclair will be hurt by this performance, but he certainly didn't come off as either charismatic or dynamic.

Mario Dumont had the most to lose from last night's debate, and I think it did hurt him. He came out like a pitbull, attacking the two other leaders in an aggressive fashion. However, the other two seemed determined to show up the lack of depth in his plans, and his lack of experience. He had few responses for their pointed questions, and looked out of control at various points. His catch phrase "People will say that a vote for the ADQ is this or that, but a vote for the ADQ is a vote for the ADQ, and if that is what you want, it's a vote for you" (my rough translation) is incoherent bafflegab. He's definitely aiming for small and medium sized communities with his very heavy emphasis on families, particularly those who don't use the daycare system, and on support for small business. It won't win him much love in Montreal, but it might just sell in the regions and in Quebec City. His platform will win him little love outside of the province - as someone who lives outside the province, his question attacking Charest regarding the lack of "demandes" from the federal government in the Liberal platform presses all the wrong buttons for me.

One thing is clear - the real show is next Monday's federal budget. Charest is promising results from his cooperation with Ottawa and the other provinces, and Dumont is waiting until after it comes down to show his numbers. And so we wait another week...

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Quebec election - Debate Night

Tonight is the leaders' debate in the Quebec election campaign. With two weeks remaining until election day, and poll numbers fluctuating pretty wildly, this event effectively kicks off the "real" campaign in some respects. Tonight voters will get to watch Charest's first leaders' debate where he has to defend his record, and we'll see if either Boisclair or Dumont are able to score significant points - or if they find themselves fending off attacks themselves.

The other shoe will drop next week with the announcement of the federal budget. From recent reports, Alberta Premier Stelmach is seeming mollified as well. Will this budget end up being everything that we've been led to expect, with hefty new subsidies for equalization? Where will that money be coming from? Will Dalton McGuinty dare attack the Harper budget with a week left in the Quebec election campaign, or will he hold his fire until the votes are in?

And apropos of absolutely nothing - I'm now into my tenth week of waiting for my renewed passport. Health care wait times are bothering me less than passport wait times at the moment.

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Montreal vs ROQ: Homophobia in the Quebec Election

Last week, it was his cocaine use, this week, it's his homosexuality. Sadly, the issue that I predicted would dog André Boisclair on the campaign trail has indeed come up, raised by a shock-jock radio host in the Saguenay, where another openly gay candidate, Sylvain Gaudreault, is running for the PQ in Jonquière.

For a campaign which started off nasty, things just seem to be getting worse and worse, and the main beneficiary of the turmoil appears to be the ADQ, which is making huge gains in Quebec City and the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region, if you believe the polls.

My read on this isn't that it's the fact that Boisclair is gay that is the central issue. As Chantal Hébert has pointed out in her new book French Kiss, which I started devouring last night, it's the fact that Boisclair is so emblematic of urban Montreal, and by extension, so appears the PQ. As we saw in the last federal election, Canadian politics appears to increasingly be reflecting a split in political (and social) values along urban-rural lines. In Quebec, this is why we see the issues of multiculturalism (or interculturalism, as it's called there), and sexuality being used as wedge issues.

Progressive Canadians should be very concerned about this trend. Rural and small-town Canada is better represented in the legislatures on a per-capita basis than the cities are, and those discontented voices will be able to flex their muscle if a) we leave the distribution of seats as it currently stands, and b) more effort isn't made to spread progressive values in smaller communities.

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Quebec election - Transfer Payments and Pipe Dreams

Sometimes I don't trust everything that I read about Quebec in English-language media. I assume that something must have been lost in translation, because what I read appears to be so ridiculous. So today, I verified a story I read in the Globe and Mail in La Presse, to make sure that I could roll on the floor with laughter.

But it's true. Apparently "Mr. Boisclair said the silence of Quebec Conservative ministers in response to Mr. Charest's weekend remarks that transfer payments to Quebec would be cut off in the event of a Yes vote in a sovereignty referendum is a deliberate attempt at influencing the election."

It's hilarious. At worst, André Boisclair was hoping to continue to propagate the myth that Quebec will continue to receive transfer payments from Ottawa, post-sovereignty (which a substantial number of "yes" voters believed in 1995). At best, he thinks that an enraged Canadian electorate would for a second tolerate continued equalization payments during the transition period as Quebec becomes an independent state - sort of a friendly good-bye present. Next he's going to be upset when Lawrence Cannon refuses to deny that the federal government will expect Quebec to take it's share of the national debt in the event of a "yes" vote.

Talk about intervention!

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Quebec election - Word Games

Words matter. That is why, in case you had any doubt, the Parti Québécois platform doesn't use the word referendum. Recent polls indicate that most Quebeckers - a whopping 67% of them, according to a recent CROP poll - don't want to have a referendum within the next government's mandate. And so this is why M. Boisclair speaks of public consultations on sovereignty, and is mealy-mouthed on why his platform dodges the "R" word, even as PQ campaign signs throughout the city highlight the word "Oui".

There is an excellent column by André Pratte today about the use of language by the sovereignist/separatist/independentist movement in Quebec. I've run into this minefield of terminology myself when writing about Quebec history. How do you describe an author who supports Quebec independence? Do you use the term "sovereignist", if that is their preferred designation? Or do you use the term separatist, since that is ultimately the political objective that they support? Different terms have wildly different meanings for people, which is why politicians are (usually) so careful in how they deploy them.

The federalist in me is very pleased by this development, as I consider M. Boisclair's reluctance to speak of referendums a sign that he's nervous about what this issue might do for his party's electoral chances. But the cynic in me wonders whether, once again, soft-pedalling the real significance of what the PQ is fighting for might fool enough of the electorate to bring them to power.

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Le Québec indépendant - Land of a million putsches

Watching the latest effort by a former PQ leader to undermine his successor, ably examined by La Presse's Michel Auger and André Pratte, I can't help but wonder what impression, if any, this makes when Quebec voters contemplate what an independent country led by these people would look like.

It must be nightmarish to think of André Boisclair's triumphant inauguration address, followed a week later by a Bernard Landry-led coup, only to be overthrown the next month by a putsch led by the Quebec armed forces sympathetic to Jacques Parizeau. Two weeks later, revolutionary militants led by Pauline Marois undertake a glorious revolution. All the while, more moderate forces are coalescing around Lucien Bouchard and Mario Dumont, undertaking covert talks with the Canadian government to see about re-entry prospects if they topple the government.

Watching the PQ leadership makes relations between Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien seem downright cordial.

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