Mr. Graves told The Hill Times that following the Quebec election last month and with the staunchly separatist Pauline Marois now premier, even though leading a minority government, an analysis of public opinion going back through the Sept. 4 Quebec vote and back to the province’s 1995 referendum on sovereignty, indicates the lowest level of support than ever for the “status quo” in Quebec and a rising indifference toward the province’s separation in the rest of the country, notably in Alberta and other Western Canadian provinces.
Mr. Graves suggested that with the role of the national government in provincial and inter-provincial areas retracting under Mr. Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.), and his popularity within Quebec plunging since 2008, a federal Liberal Party election of Mr. Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) as its leader could radically transform voter options for the next federal election in 2015.
Bruce Hicks, a political commentator from Concordia University in Montreal agreed. He told The Hill Times that skepticism outside Quebec about the chances of Mr. Trudeau winning over substantial support in the province because of the controversial legacy in the province of his father, former late prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is off the mark.
Mr. Graves told The Hill Times that poll numbers even now suggest the percentage of voters in Alberta who would support Quebec separation are roughly equivalent to the percentage of voters in Quebec who want the province to secede.
Meanwhile, because Ms. Marois and her Parti Québécois won only a minority of 54 of the 125 seats in Québec’s National Assembly, voters in the rest of the country have put the possibility of a referendum on sovereignty quietly to the back of their minds, Mr. Graves said.
But he noted Ms. Marois strengthened her hand by strongly playing up her preference for a vote on independence from the onset of the Quebec election campaign and said with Mr. Charest gone and a nationalist-leaning Philippe Couillard set to win the provincial Liberal helm, only NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair (Outremont, Que.) is left.
Mr. Trudeau, should he win the federal Liberal leadership, could be the sole national or Quebec political figure who could legitimately champion his devotion to both Quebec and Canada should a unity crisis arrive, argued Mr. Graves.
“In my view, all of this adds up to a great big huge whacking national unity crisis that English Canada is sleepwalking away from, and that is going to put itself very forcefully on the national agenda within the next two to three years,” Mr. Graves said.
“If you have a new Liberal leader from Quebec with a passion for Canada, it adds a whole new context to the political landscape if this happens,” he said, as Mr. Trudeau continued to generate headlines across Canada and support from within the federal Liberal caucus last week.
“Whether the motives are cynical or whether they are political or not, the simple fact is if you add to the mix a guy who is young, who appeals to this sort of frustrated younger Canada that’s been sitting on the sidelines, a guy who appeals to women and those with liberal values, who have been frustrated about the choices for some time, a guy who wants to establish the middle and the middle class, and by the way do you really want Thomas Mulcair, clearly his supporters include a lot of separatists,” Mr. Graves said.
“Whether he [Mr. Mulcair] is agnostic or utilitarian or just pragmatic on his views, he’s clearly not ‘Mr. Heart On His Sleeve Canadian Federalism,’ there’s no question,” Mr. Graves said.
Mr. Hicks said Canadians outside Quebec forget that, despite former prime minister Trudeau’s decision to go ahead with historic constitutional change without Quebec’s support after René Lévesque lost the first referendum on the province’s independence in 1980, Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals held virtually all the Commons seats in Quebec until 1984, when former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney joined forces with sovereigntists and nationalists in Quebec to later sweep the province while winning the largest federal majority in Canadian history.
Mr. Mulroney’s election led to the next national unity crisis when a constitutional accord he hammered out with the 10 provinces in 1987 unravelled as new governments in Manitoba and Newfoundland withdrew support, and the Progressive Conservatives were swept out of power and nearly out of the Commons entirely in 1993 because of a backlash in Quebec and Western Canada. The 1995 referendum quickly followed, barely won by the federalist side.
Mr. Hicks said Mr. Trudeau could become, if he wins the leadership, a game changer in the national unity equation.
“There’s no one who is actually speaking for national unity at this time, so I think those numbers [of rising indifference to the possibility of a Quebec referendum] may be distorted just because the federal government’s position is very much decentralist and about provincial autonomy,” Mr. Hicks said. “They’re not waving the Canadian flag and talking about what we need to keep the country united the way that the Liberals were doing up until they lost office, and the Progressive Conservatives used to do under Brian Mulroney.
“Even though Mulroney opened a hornet’s nest with Meech Lake [the 1987 accord] and Charlottetown [a 1992 attempt at a third attempt to get Quebec’s constitutional support], he ostensibly was doing it because he thought that this would solve a national unity problem for the future,” said Mr. Hicks.
“The new Conservative Party just believes in provincial autonomy and has no interest in doing anything special for Quebec, so you don’t have a dialogue or a discourse taking place the way that we have had in the past,” said Mr. Hicks.
“If Trudeau wins the leadership, he will be probably the sole voice among Québec politicians that is genuinely federalist,” Mr. Hicks said.
Mr. Trudeau won an endorsement last week from one of the most prominent federal Liberal figures in Atlantic Canada, MP Dominic LeBlanc (Beauséjour, N.B.).
Two other Atlantic MPs had previously endorsed Mr. Trudeau—Newfoundland MPs Scott Simms (Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor, Nfld.) and former Liberal Cabinet minister Wayne Easter (Malpeque, P.E.I.).
Late last week, Nova Scotia Liberal MP Mark Eyking (Sydney-Victoria, N.S.) told The Hill Times he too is supporting Mr. Trudeau. The only declared candidate so far apart from Toronto lawyer Deborah Coyne, a veteran of the 1980s constitutional battles who has a daughter from her close relationship with former prime minister Trudeau.
With no other candidates on the horizon in Atlantic Canada, the declarations suggest a majority of Liberals in all four Atlantic provinces are likely to support Mr. Trudeau.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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