Front Burner - The terrible, no good year for Quebec sovereignty

Episode Date: December 26, 2018

"For 40 years, sovereignty has been in elections by default because either the party in power or the party in opposition was a sovereigntist party ? that is no longer the case," says long-time Quebec journalist Martin Patriquin. While the question of sovereignty remains front of mind for many Quebecers, this year it wasn't an issue in a Quebec election for the first time in decades. Today on Front Burner, Patriquin sheds light on why the province's separatist movement is struggling, but why it will endure.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. I'm Jamie Poisson.

It's been 23 years now since Quebec held its final referendum on the question of sovereignty. The country's future lies in the hands of one province tonight. Five million Quebecers are choosing between yes and no, between Quebec and Canada. We are ready to make now that final projection on the evening. CBC decision desk calling for a no victory numerically tonight. It's going to be a squeaker, maybe as much as one percentage point. But since the referendum, separatist parties haven't gone away. They've formed governments in Quebec and taken dozens of seats in the House of Commons.

Sovereignty stayed a serious question on the Quebec ballot. But not this year. For the first time in decades, the main contenders in the Quebec provincial election agreed. Independence? Not on the table. This is the first time in 50-odd years that we don't have Quebec politics being sort of mainly played on that axis of sovereignty versus federalism. Both the main separatist parties had terrible years.

So, was 2018 the end of the sovereignty movement in Quebec? Today on FrontBurner, I'm speaking with Martin Patrican. He covers Quebec for iPolitics. Hi, Marty. Hi there. So you've been covering the political scene in Quebec for years now. Can you tell me about a moment when it really became clear to you that the separatist movement was in trouble? I mean, the separatist movement has been in trouble for most of the time that I've been reporting on it.

You know, it wasn't always obvious in the polls. But I mean, if you look at the sort of political support of the Parti Québécois, it went pretty high in 1998 and started declining, or it's been declining, I guess, basically since 1998. The moment where I realized that it wasn't a going concern amongst people who really, really matter to carry it forward, that is to say younger people, was in 2014. It was more or less Pauline Marois. We were in the middle of a campaign and the election was about two weeks away. Pauline Marois had like a, she was the leader then, she was running for premier, or re-election, I guess. She had sort of a love in a big downtown club. And we all lined up and went in there to go see this. And it was like a

reverie. It was like going back 20 years and looking at what the separatist movement used to be. Everybody in the room was, you know, the average age was probably 55 or 60. Jean-Pierre Ferland, who was an old, old, old school kind of crooner, Quebec crooner, got up on stage and sang this song called T'es Belle to Miss Madame Marois. And it just, it was like the whole thing, it felt like it could have been wrapped in gauze. And remember, we were two weeks away from an election. And it sort of put a point on what the whole election had been like up until that point.

That was the year that the Parti Québécois ran less on sovereignty, though there was that, of course, but ran more on something called the Charter de Valor Québécois, or the Charter of Quebec Values. So basically, they introduced a law, the Parti Québécois government, the minority government at the time, introduced a law that basically would have outlawed the wearing of any sort of, you know, large, what's it, religious symbols, I guess, on the bodies of anybody drawing a government paycheck. So that is to say you weren't allowed like oversized crosses, you weren't allowed chadors, you certainly weren't allowed kneecaps, you weren't allowed hijabs, no kipas, nothing like that. It was seen as a way

to sort of replace separatism in a way, because talking about separatism for the Parti Québécois had become an electoral sort of dead weight. And so they went on this identitarian idea that visible minorities, or I mean, more appropriately, I guess, as more religious minorities, were taking up more and more space within Quebec society. And this had to be stopped. It plainly isn't true. And it was sort of a campaign that was really played on a lot of fear. And again, this was something that it's a real baby boomer concern amongst the baby boomers in Quebec. You know, this sort of idea that their culture is being taken over. The younger generations don't have nearly that worry about it. They don't have nearly

have that paranoia about it. So it was so obvious to me that they were basically going after one demographic to win this election. And demonstrably it didn't work because they lost pretty badly. So do you think it's fair to say that sovereignty or the idea of sovereignty is dead in Quebec? Absolutely not. No, no, it'll never go away. You know, on a good or bad day, you go out and you do a poll and you'll still find 25 to 30 percent of people who say that they're in favor of the idea. What's changed, what's changed, I guess, is that it's becoming less and less of a political concern. You know, for basically 40 years, sovereignty has been in elections by default because either the party in power or the party in opposition was a sovereignist party.

So one way or another, you're playing the federalist sovereignist game. That is no longer the case with the most recent election, with the election of Collision Avenir Quebec. So I think what the issue for sovereignists, I guess, beyond the obvious demographic issue, is to make it politically viable again. And that is an uphill battle for them. You know, I'm interested in separatist movements in other places in the world. In Scotland, for example, it's much stronger than in Quebec. Why do you think that is the case? Because Scotland did something very interesting.

I remember when the referendum happened a few years ago in Scotland, ultimately losing for the nationalists. But you watched the ads there. You didn't even really have to dig in too much. You just had to watch what they were putting out. And if you watched the ads, the ads incorporated a lot of not just native Scotland people. And, you know, there weren't just reefing on the whole idea of like, you know, tartans and bagpipes and the usual tropes that come out of Scotland.

It wasn't identitarian in that sense. They were actually bringing in people that had immigrated to Scotland because very smartly, the SNP, the Scottish Nationalist Party, saw that the support of people that were coming into Scotland was crucial, was absolutely crucial to move the movement forward. Well, I grew up in a Scotland where the decisions about our future are taken by the people who care most about Scotland, the people who live here. Quebecers in the sovereignist movement or Quebec sovereignists have done the exact opposite here. Quebecers in the Sovereignist Movement or Quebec Sovereignists

have done the exact opposite here. Can you give me some examples of how they've done the exact opposite? If you think about it, they have an uphill battle to begin with

because people that move to Quebec, come from outside of the country, move to Quebec, but they are ultimately immigrating to Canada. So to convince them

to get out of Canada is a difficult thing. That said, if you look back at early years of the PQ, 1976, 1980, there was a real push to get new Quebecers, quote-unquote, it's called the neo-Québécois, into the movement. And there was a certain amount of success there, particularly amongst Haitians and amongst the Greeks and Italians. There was actually some embrace of the movement here. And it all came to a screeching halt in 1995 when Jacques Parizeau said what he said, that is to say, we lost, in 1995,

obviously the referendum that was fairly close, and they said, you know, we lost this because of money and some ethnic votes. It is true that we have been defeated, but basically by what? By money and by the ethnic vote. Basically, that's it. They never really fully recovered from that, for obvious reasons.

It became a sort of, we can't recruit these people, so we might as well just not try, even try. So after 1995, the sort of furtive attempts to get people outside of what you would consider one of the run-of-the-mill Quebecer, I guess, you know, white, lapsed Catholic type,

to move beyond that just wasn't something of a going concern. And even worse, it almost became like scorched earth nationalism in the sense that we're not going to recruit them,

so we might as well scapegoat them if that gets us any sort of electoral play. We saw the election this year, you mentioned before, of the Coalition Avenir Quebec, the CAQ. CBC is projecting a CAQ government. Quebecers had a thirst for change, and for the first time in 52 years... It's led by Francois Legault, a man who was once thought of as an heir apparent to the Sovereigntist movement. He tried to be the head of the Parti Québécois three times. This new party, the CAQ, how would you define their

position on Quebec sovereignty? Yeah, as you said, he was a diehard. He was a convinced Sovereignist. In 2005 he wrote something called Le Budget de l'art, which is the year one budget. Basically a document that was prepared by the Parti Québécois when they were in opposition to basically show the financial viability of sovereignty. You know, it was very, obviously very bullish on the eye of sovereignty, saying that Quebec could be within surplus within five years. And it was sort of designed to quell the fears amongst the population that separating Quebec from the rest of the country would be an

economic calamity. François Legault wrote this thing and was convinced of it. But as the years went on, he became convinced that sovereignty simply wasn't going to happen. It wasn't out of any sort of grand love for the rest of the country or anything like that. I think it was very pragmatic on his part to go, sure, it'd be nice, but we've tried twice. Movement's sucking wind a little bit. It's time to move on to other things. Quebec has great economic and demographic problems that have to be addressed that we can address with Quebec as firmly within the Canadian Federation. We will focus on three clear priorities in the weeks ahead. One, we'll ensure a stronger economy. Second, we will improve our education system.

And three, we will provide better health services. He did that, basically started running campaigns. And the classic thing happened was that the Liberal Party came out and said, no, you know, you can't vote for the CAQ because it's a closet sovereignist party. And Francois Legault is a sovereignist, he's going to want to have another referendum. This is exactly what the Liberal Party does all the time, is basically scapegoat sovereignists to get back into office. It's an unhealthy, toxic political environment in that sense.

So what Francois Legault did was in 2015, in the actual charter of the party, said that the CAQ is a nationalist party within Canada. Sort of took away a lot of that fear. And so what we saw in the most recent election was a culmination of that, was basically Quebecers were allowed to be nationalists but also be part of Canada at the same time. The CAQ won 74 seats, capturing ridings in almost every part of the province. The Liberals were... Could you give me a sense of how badly the Parti Quebecois did in the last election? I know that it was one of their worst showings since their inception. And what almost made it worse was that the leader of the Parti Quebecois up until the election,

that is to say a guy named Jean-François Lize, he actually ran a very good campaign. The fact that he lost as badly as he did sort of shows the institutional problems that the Parts de Québécois has. The Parts de Québécois' normal reaction whenever they lose an election is to turf the leader and say the leader was the problem. They can't do that anymore. You know, even diehard Parts de Québécois types are forced to say that Lise actually ran a pretty good campaign and lost despite it. And that maybe the problem isn't the leader, but the actual party and the actual issue of sovereignty itself. And this is also a very tough year for the federal sovereignty party, the Bloc Québécois. So can you give me a sense of what happened there as well? Yeah, it was a cleaning house of the Bloc Québécois.

It was led by a woman named Martine Ouellette, diehard, diehard sovereignist, doctrinaire, unbending. She sort of came in here, bold in a China's chop style, and said, this party that as it stands now is basically helping the cause of federalism. We have to be the shock troops for sovereignty here in Ottawa. And people didn't like that. And so people started leaving in droves. The seven fed-up MPs say she didn't listen, and they fundamentally disagreed about how to best pursue independence. The way Mrs. Wallet see our job, it's like being salesman for sovereignty

and repeating day after day that Quebec should be independent, Quebec should be independent. I believe Quebec should be independent, but I don't believe that saying that day after day will make people believe the same. There's been some, I guess, reconciliation within the party, but it remains, look, this is a long, long way away from the heyday of Louis-Saint-Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe, you know, when the Bloc Québécois loomed large over the federal scene. Do you see a scenario in which separatism in Quebec revitalizes the concept of separatism becomes much more popular again? There's always a scenario. If there's a willing base of, let's put it at 20% of the population

that is bedrock support for sovereignty, then I don't think you're ever going to have a situation where there isn't some sort of political movement within the province that's going to try to harness that. Because it's a sizable minority. So for example, Quebec Solidaire, which is a lefty party, you know, socialist sort of way that Bernie Sanders would be in the United States. Not a perfect analogy, but just to give an idea. They are separatists. It's in their charter they want to separate from Canada, which they call a petro-state. So what they have going for them is they have massive, massive youth support.

What their problem is, is that while the party executive and the party leaders and the MNAs that are sent to Quebec are quite sovereignist, The base isn't. There's a huge part of the base that isn't at all interested in the idea of sovereignty and is attracted to Quebec Solidaire because... Of other policies that they have. Yeah, exactly. And also just by dint of the fact that they're young and new and interesting and invigorating. So could they do it? Possibly. If anybody's going to do it, it'll probably be them. Marty, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.

Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. In 2019, the bloc and the PQ will hold leadership races after the resignations of Martine Ouellette and Francois Lise. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging.

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