 PETER BLACK Craven opportunists keep the power
Singer Shania Twain could add this verse to her bad-grammar hit: "So you got a 91 percent endorsement from your party. That don't impress me much ..." Premier Bouchard proved last weekend that he's "got the moves" to keep the fractious Parti Quebecois in line, but does he "have the touch" to warm blasé voters to a referendum on sovereignty?
By all accounts, the dramatically hyped PQ convention was as unpredictable and exciting as the movement of the planets, with months and months of arm-twisting and fence-mending paying off in the near-unanimous vote of confidence in the premier and a slate of resolutions pre-sniffed for explosives by keen-nosed party hounds.
As has been noted by the usual parade of pundits, Bouchard's limp 76 percent score at the 1996 PQ hoe-down, was largely the result of a party still pining for Jacques Parizeau's uncompromising position on sovereignty. The rank and file gave Bouchard the cold shoulder because they were not convinced he was a true sovereignist nor had the stones to take a harder line on language laws.
That's all changed now.
Bouchard somehow has convinced the party he is serious about "our obsession" -- sovereignty -- and he will work night and day to make it happen "as soon as possible."
To keep the language worry-warts in the party on side he's going to set up an Estates General to keep them busy looking at new ways to protect French from such threats as private English boarding schools, immigrants in English colleges, and bilingual commercial signs.
Shania: "Whatever!"
What the PQ really did on the weekend, as Lysiane Gagnon of La Presse and others have observed, was to confirm its transformation into what Preston Manning would call an "old line party," existing chiefly to keep itself in power with whatever policies do the trick.
The PQ was once an ideological formation uniting under the same sovereignty banner strange bedfellows ranging from student revolutionary Claude Charron to aristocratic stuffed shirt Parizeau.
Nowadays, under the leadership of Lucien Bouchard, analysts say it's become as cravenly opportunistic and power-driven as Roy Romanow's "socialists" or Jean Chretien's "liberals." The PQ has now adorned its "sovereignist" mission with ironic quotation marks.
We don't know whether in their heart of hearts the people who have worked for decades for the dream of a country feel any closer to that goal after the big PQ convention, the last major one before an election, or, nudge-nudge, a referendum. We do know that the PQ under Bouchard could very well be poised to pull off what in the long run is a much grander coup than winning some can-of-worms referendum vote.
Polls show that if an election were held today Bouchard would likely do much better than he did in 1998 when he went up against erstwhile Liberal golden boy Jean Charest. Among francophone voters Bouchard is so far ahead of the Liberals it's almost embarrassing.
The PQ is so far ahead of Charest among francos partly because they feel the party offers the best protection for the future of French. This is a valid concern given the influence of allophones in Montreal, the prevalence and power of the Internet, and economic globalization with an English accent.
But at the same time Quebecers are not convinced political sovereignty is the best guarantee of French survival.
A third term for Bouchard means the PQ may be around to capitalize on shifting currents in politics outside Quebec. A Canadian Alliance government, for example, may be much more open to discussions of a new arrangement with the rest of Canada than the current Trudeauesque regime. On the other hand, if the Alliance spooks the province with anti-Quebec intolerance, then a referendum run becomes all the more likely in a third term.
Bouchard is well on track to win a third consecutive majority government, an impressive trick that hasn't been performed since Maurice Duplessis perfected the art of combining patronage with populism. Duplessis won four successive majorities, five in total, so Bouchard still has a long way to go to be really impressive.
"So you think you're Maurice or something?" Shania might not be impressed, but the PQ seems to be
Copyright © 2000 Peter Black/Log Cabin Chronicles/05.2000 |
