Front Burner - Can the Bloc Québécois return from the brink?

Episode Date: August 30, 2019

The Bloc Québécois was once a powerful federal political party, forming the official opposition in 1993 and holding around fifty seats in the House in the mid to late 2000's. But the last two elections have nearly wiped the Bloc from existence, and the party has had a revolving door of leaders. This year, Yves-François Blanchet took over the reins. Today on Front Burner, as part of our series on the federal party leaders, we take a look at who Blanchet is and what he stands for with Martin Patriquin, a freelance political journalist based in Montreal.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Chris Berube, sitting in for Jamie Poisson. So if you're an English candidate, you're probably not paying much attention to the Bloc Quebecois. But remember, back in 1993, the Bloc was the official opposition. They had a lot of political sway. Our goal is not to ramp the fabric of Canadian institutions,

but to make the House of Commons more aware of the aspirations of the people that have elected us today. But the last two elections have almost wiped them out. The bloc has kind of crumbled beginning in 2011 when its seats were reduced from 47 to 4. They've had six leaders in the past eight years, and now the Bloc has a leader tasked with rebuilding the party. We have to build a lot with very few resources and with a lot of humility. I think that's a good thing for the idea, for the party, for the movement. Today, we're talking about Yves-Francois Blanchet. We've been doing these profiles of all the major party leaders in the run-up to the October election. I'm joined by Martin

Patrickwin. He's a politics journalist based in Montreal, and we're going to talk about the state of the bloc and whether Blanchet has a chance to make them relevant again. This is FrontBurner. Martin, thanks for coming back on FrontBurner. Thanks for having me. So Yves-Francois Blanchet, he came to politics from a pretty different place from the other party leaders. So what was his life before he got into politics? Well, he was a music manager.

So there's a Quebec rocker by the name of Éric Lapointe, and he's sort of considered the bad boy of Quebec rock. I was trying to think of a way on the way over here how to describe Eric Le Point. Eric Le Point's like Nickelback crossed with Joe Cocker, but in French and everything that entails. So, you know, sort of a guy who's a walking blues song, like, you know, is basically a victim of his own proclivities and excesses and all that kind of stuff.

And he was his manager, and that meant sort of making sure that he got on stage, making sure he got paid. So he went from that. Then he was also president of LADZISK, which is the independent recording industry sort of umbrella group, I guess. Right. And so he was in there for a long time.

And then he went into politics. He went with the Parti Québécois. And then he was back doing punditry here on Radio-Canada. So with everything on the set to discuss, Gilles Ouimet and François Blanchet. Hello. Gilles. I thought I was going to call myself Gilles. And then threw his hat back in and decided to go back to politics with the Bloc Québécois. So what actually like drew him into politics? Like what are his convictions? He's very much a, as you can tell by from his background, he's sort of steeped in Quebec culture.

And so he comes at it with a very, that old school mentality that Quebec is fundamentally different from the rest of the country. And all you have to do is look at our language and our culture. And that, you know, while we can be good neighbors, we should really be separate. Quebec should be its own separate country. The idea for a nation, for a people to have its own country cannot die and cannot be irrelevant. country cannot die and cannot be irrelevant. It's been chosen by so many people in the last century. Why would any of that be any bad for Quebec? And that's a very, I mean, look, it's a very sort of prominent worldview as far as of people within the artistic community here in Quebec, certainly of a certain age of his ilk, I guess. And so that's what he brought into politics. And then you wrote a profile of him

a couple of years ago and got to spend some time with him. What was that like? He's, his nickname, it's funny, his nickname is Goon. So known for his short temper and his sort of blunt speaking style. He was nicknamed that by one of his colleagues, and it just sort of stuck. In talking with him, I was talking to him in the context of the 2012 Quebec election, during which you saw some of the beginnings of the Parti Québécois, as they say in French, virage towards identity issues.

We have the right to be ourselves. We have the right to be proud. We have the right to be proud. And his big thing then, when I spoke to him, was language. And the existential problem that is Montreal because of the spread of English to the detriment of the French. It's that sort of reductionist arithmetic. That is to say, if you hear English, you are necessarily... Not speaking French. Yeah, exactly. You're not speaking French and you're

speaking English at the expense of French. And so one of the anecdotes he told me, we're sitting there in a Tim Hortons in Drummondville, and the first thing is that he was looking at his Tim Hortons cup. I still remember this. He was looking at his Tim Hortons cup and it bothered him that it said Café Tim Hortons and not Le Café because that's grammatically correct. Right.

And the other anecdote that he told me was that he was getting dining at a Vietnamese restaurant somewhere up in Rosemont-des-Patries, which is a historically Francophone working class neighborhood, and realized partway through the experience of dining that he was doing most of his ordering and talking to the waiter in English. And he sort of did this without thinking, and that really bothered him. And, you know, it is really, really easy for people like us to sort of make fun of that and say, oh, what an idiot.

But amongst a certain generation of sovereignists, that is the sore point, is the idea is that you are in your milieu, you are in your city, and here you are speaking English because the person across from you either doesn't want to or can't speak French or doesn't occur to them to speak French, put it that way. And that is a visceral, visceral thing because that opens up all sorts of old boons. And I understand the knee-jerk reaction to sort of laugh at that, like laugh about the apostrophe in Tim Hortons or le café as opposed to café. to sort of laugh at that, like laugh about the apostrophe in Tim Hortons or le café as opposed to café. Well, to say that doesn't seem as important as the other issues that you have to take

on when you're running a federal party. That's right. And to be fair to him, he was running in a provincial party at the time. And the fundamental issue is that it always comes down to that existential question here in Quebec, is that we are a people of 8 million, 6.5 million of which are French speakers, and we are in a sea of millions and hundreds of millions of people who don't speak our language. So we have to almost have this garrison mentality in order for us to survive.

And to be perfectly frank, there's a bit of truth. There's certainly a bit of truth to that. Now, Quebec sovereignty, it's not really a top of mind issue, I think, for a lot of people, especially in English Canada coming into this election. And I think the big question you have to answer when you're the leader of the bloc is, how much do I push sovereignty as our main issue? And how much do I push a referendum? Like, where does Blanchet stand on that? I was looking at the website this morning. And so it has the Modes Président, which is the president's sort of forward.

Then it says l'indépendance du Québec is the second one underneath. If you look at all the literature and everything like that, it's still very much friend of mine. They always present themselves as being the ante-room to sovereignty in Ottawa and that it exists for the exact reason that Lucien Bouchard created the party in 1991, which is to say we are here as a pressure party to get Quebec out of the Canadian Federation. We think that we need a political arrangement different from what it is now with the rest of Canada. It will be a radically different arrangement. That's in theory.

It will be a radically different arrangement. That's in theory. In practice, sort of really push and aggravate the differences between Canada and Quebec. And so one of the things that Blanchet pushes a lot on these days is the question of oil, oil and oil pipelines. You know, this idea of having people buying more and more and burning more and more oil, which will bring the whole planet nowhere. and burning more and more oil, which will bring the whole planet nowhere. As a nation, like any other nation, we have to put a lot of pressure on any country that keeps doing that. We are killing this world.

We have a complicated relationship with oil here in Quebec that we use it nearly as much as any other North American society, but we critique it a lot. There's a new Angus Reid poll out that tells us the oil and gas industry is becoming a priority for Canadians in this election year. There is support for pipelines in every province except for Quebec. We critique it a lot more, and the environmentalist movement is a lot stronger here and a lot more vocal than elsewhere. And Blanchet counts himself amongst one of those.

Right. And in some ways, oil is really an issue where you can draw a line between Quebec and Canada as represented by the West, right? Like having pipelines, you have to have a pipeline come through Quebec if you want to move Alberta oil to the East Coast. So that's how that issue kind of manifests itself. That's right. So if Trudeau wins the election in October, he has less of a problem with someone like Yves-Francois Blanchet because Trudeau isn't advocating for an East Coast pipeline. So Energy East was here, as everyone knows. We had the plan to put it in and then it got cancelled because the company pulled out. TransCanada pulled out. In a statement today, TransCanada said it made the decision

after careful review of changed circumstances. The massive pipeline expansion was put on hold in the wake of new and more stringent environmental approval requirements for the National Energy Board. Would you consider championing a west-east pipeline? It doesn't have to be energy east that might go through Quebec. Well, if there's going to be such a proposal, it has to come forward from the private sector. And Trudeau has essentially bought a pipeline to push to the West Coast, so that takes care of that. The interesting part is if the Conservatives come in.

One of the key points in Andrew Scheer's plank is a quote-unquote energy corridor running right through Canada. Carrying Canadian resources and energy from coast to coast, we could create wealth and opportunity while uniting Canadians like never before. And so necessarily that means putting a pipeline through Quebec. And it's interesting, he talks a lot about that very issue outside of Quebec, but mentions it hardly at all when he's actually in the province of Quebec. And that extends to his language too.

You look at some of the stuff that they've put out, the Conservative Party has put out, and it wasn't me that figured this out, it was a journalist in Quebec City, that he uses the word oil in English Canada and uses the word energy in Quebec. Energy East was a pipeline that would have taken energy from Western Canada to Eastern Canada, displacing foreign oil. Yeah, when Blanchette took over the Bloc Quebecois, he had his first speech. He said, we really have to reach younger people. And it feels like kind of these identity issues and the issue of sovereignty is not so top of mind for younger people. But energy and oil really can be a way that it can be both a Quebec issue and like something that reaches younger people worried about climate change.

That's right. and like something that reaches younger people worried about climate change. That's right. So if you were the sovereignist version one back in the day, you would have aggravated the differences, the linguistic differences and the cultural differences between English and French Canada. So what you're seeing now with Mr. Blanchet is go, look, Canada is a petro-state.

Look, Quebec is greener than green. We want to make things very green. We are green and everything around us that has to do with Canada is soaked in oil. That's the difference that he's going to aggravate. Not so much the linguistic one, but the petrochemical based ones. Right. It's not the cultural differences. Actually, we have a policy difference from the rest of Canada that makes it necessary for us to become more independent from them. There's a bit of truth to this. There's also a lot of myth making that Quebecers are inherently greener than the rest of the country. Now,

we do use a little bit less oil than everybody else, given the fact that there's so much hydropower here. But look, the top-selling car here in Quebec is the F-150. People buy SUVs as much as they do anywhere else. Quebec is a massive, massive province geographically wise with a comparatively small population. What does that mean? People drive more. Look, we're as addicted to oil as anyone else. Regardless, the myths are difficult to break.

And I never said that Quebecers were saints, which does not mean that to have to be forced into being accomplice to this toxic development of tar sand oil. I want to talk about one of the biggest challenges for Blanchet, and that is the party that he's actually leading right now. Because the last few years of the Bloc Quebecois, I looked into this.

It was they've had six leaders in the last eight years by my count. It's been like a pretty tumultuous time. So leaders and interim leaders, right? Right, exactly. And if we go back to the last election, I mean, the party only had two seats. They had been wiped out by the NDP. The party says it's seeing a surge of support across the country, but particularly in Quebec. They coaxed Gilles Duceppe out of retirement.

Duceppe says the NDP has failed to defend Quebec's interests in Ottawa. How could sovereignty be represented in Ottawa with people always saying that they're against their ideal? What happened in that election? Because they did turn it around to some extent. To some extent, yeah, for sure. So, Gilles Decep was brought out. There's a great term in French, and people can Google this. It's called sauver les meubles.

And that means essentially save the furniture. Right. The water's creeping up. Get the furniture on the roof so that we save it. It doesn't get waterlogged and we all get drifted away to sea. That's basically what Gillesuceppe did in that election. He was, not to say he was a spent force, but he suffered a very sort of humiliating defeat in 2011.

I announce that I leave the functions. He says he's accepting responsibility for the crushing defeat. And came back in 2015, sort of used the last of his political clout to turn things around. Did it work? He didn't win himself. The NDP beat him in his own seat. But it worked in the sense that people around him managed to get elected when they probably should have lost. In other words, those seats that would have gone, that the NDP was probably going to lose anyway, didn't go to the liberals. They went back to the bloc. So that's what they did. So now they have, if I'm not mistaken, they have 10. They won 10 seats in the last one,

but they also ran a campaign that I think, especially in English Canada, struck a wrong note for a lot of people. It ended up being a very controversial campaign. You're allowed to use the word abhorrent. Okay. That's interesting that you bring that up. I'll explain basically what the ad was. One of the main ads was, and it was pretty close to the election date. Basically it was a drop

of oil sort of morphing into a niqab. And even if we're not okay with wearing a niqab to vote or take an oath, Thomas Mulcair, he's fine with it. It's one drop too many. Because the NDP was seen as the main opponents to them.

If you elect the NDP, Quebec will be overrun with oil and niqabs. Right. Again, I use the word abhorrent there, and I stand by it. It's a brutal thing. It's particularly brutal because Gilles Duceppe himself, when at the provincial level, was going through all this sort of identity stuff and Charter of Quebec Values, which would have

seen, you know, the prohibition of the hijab and the kippah, etc., etc. It would ban the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols. The minister responsible for this, Bernard Dranville, says he thinks these rules are necessary because there's tension about this.

He calls it a crisis. The state must be neutral. Gilles Duceppe was sort of one of the ones who spoke out against it to the extent that he could and has said for as long as I can remember him being in politics that a Quebecer is a Quebecer is a Quebecer, to paraphrase Justin Trudeau. So for him to come out and do this, it sort of showed me exactly the limits of civic

nationalism, right? Because he's in trouble. He's got the NDP breathing down his neck. And what does he do? He reverts to this sort of scorched earth idea that was straight out of a Stephen Harper playbook to say, look, if you don't vote for us, we're the last bulwark against oil and kneecaps. Did it work? I mean, they did do better than they thought. So in a way, do you feel like the party, the Bloc Quebecois, changed because of that election? Because they have been seen for the longest time as kind of a socially progressive party, like they had a policy of voting for same-sex marriage, for example, when that came up years ago. And now they're playing on these kind of identity issues and issues around specifically, you know, Islam in Quebec.

Like, did that fundamentally change what the party's about? I mean, the Bloc Québécois is often seen as the poor cousin of the Parti Québécois. And that's exactly what the Parti Québécois did. In the 2012, when they first elected and then the election after that, pushed, as I was mentioning before, the Charter of Quebec Values. The Parti Québécois, which I will remind listeners, started off as not quite multicultural, but very, very open to newcomers and differences within the society, also closed ranks. So the fact that the Bloc Québécois is doing that now doesn't really surprise me.

So I want to run through just the last couple of years because Doucette, as you mentioned, lost his seat in the 2015 election. And then he went back into retirement. And the party went through a little bit of soul searching and they ended up picking this woman, Martine Ouellette, to run the party. Ouellette spoke about the party's sovereignty agenda and how many underestimate the strength of the Bloc Québécois. And she lasted a year. I mean, that was a very tumultuous time. Like seven members of the 10-person caucus quit in protest. That's right. The seven fed-up MPs say she didn't listen,

and they fundamentally disagreed about how to best pursue independence. The way Mrs. Wallet sees our job, it's like being salesman. I believe Quebec should be independent, but I don't believe that saying that day after day will make people believe the same, you know? Ouellette, she came in, she lasted a year in this leadership position and ended up being essentially forced out because she lost her entire caucus, basically. And into this void comes Yves-François Blanchet. And now he's coming by acclamation. He becomes the leader of the party. And he's walking into a party that clearly has had this kind of disorganization the last couple of years. What does he do to get the party back on track? They have been for a long time. What he brings to the party, though, I think is that name recognition.

Everybody sort of knows this guy. For his time as manager for Éric Le Point, as president of La Disque, and then he was, you know, a pundit on Radio-Canada here on a show called Clube des Ex. Le travail du premier ministre, ce n'est pas de fournir la clip de 30 secondes aux journalistes pour le bulletin du soir. So he's a very, very well-known entity and has experience within politics. Right. So I think that's a lot of what he brings. And, you know, it's sort of reflected in the polls.

The Bloc Québécois hasn't done anything because there hasn't been an election. Right. But the second that he was sort of elected leader, the Bloc Québécois went from dead in the water to not quite dead in the water within the space of a few weeks. It was actually kind of interesting to watch. It's going to be very interesting. Yves-François Plachette will be in the debates. He's one of the five leaders who will be part of those. So for people in English Canada who he doesn't have a huge profile with, like that'll probably be the introduction, I think, for a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. And I hate to say it, but he doesn't really care about him. I mean, fundamentally, he doesn't care about the rest of the country at all. I mean, that's the nature of the Bloc Québécois.

You know, he says all the right things. You know, Canada is a lovely country, blah, blah, blah. But we're fundamentally different. That's the way he is, and that's the way he's always going to be. Martin, thank you so much for talking to us today. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. This is the third in our series of profiles on the federal party leaders.

You can actually find our episodes on Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer in our feed. That's all for this week. FrontBurder comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. This week, the show was produced by Shannon Higgins, Imogen Burchard, Matt Ama, and Ashley Mack. Derek Vanderwyk is our sound designer. We had help this week from Billy Heaton. Our music is by Joseph Chabison of Boombox Sound.

This week, the executive producer of Frontburner was Elaine Chao, sitting in for Nick McCabe-Locos. Your host, of course, is Jamie Poisson, and I'm Chris Berube. Thanks for listening to cbc.ca slash podcasts.