Quebec’s ‘Yes’ to NDP lost in translation

As recently as six months ago, running for the NDP in Quebec was synonymous with becoming a sacrificial lamb.

The party was going nowhere in the polls; its hold on its sole Quebec riding was tenuous; there were already unanswered questions about leader Jack Layton’s health.

The Bloc Québécois looked poised to hold the social democrat fort in Quebec for at least as long as Gilles Duceppe was at the helm.

Duceppe had cause to believe his left flank had never been more secure.

He was arguing forcefully that Quebec social democrats could not hope for a society that reflected their ideals within a Canada that was leaning more decisively towards Stephen Harper’s brand of conservatism with every election.

With the Parti Québécois leading in the provincial voting intentions, a case could be made that the march towards Quebec independence was about to resume.

In the circumstances, to agree to run for the NDP could only be construed as turning away from the pursuit of sovereignty.

Given the context, to retroactively portray Layton’s party as a fallback vehicle for Quebec nationalism amounts to rewriting election history.

That rewriting excises the inconvenient fact that the voters who gave the NDP its sweeping Quebec victory on May 2nd already had a road-tested nationalist option on the ballot in the shape of the Bloc.

And then, no constituency in Quebec is more staunchly federalist than its anglophone minority.

Layton hails from that community.

So does Thomas Mulcair, the MP who was the Quebec face of the NDP until May 2nd.

In the aftermath of the 1995 referendum, Mulcair who then sat as a Liberal in the National Assembly was particularly vocal in pursuing the notion that the ruling PQ had rigged the vote in favour of sovereignty.

The reality is that those who ran for the NDP in the last campaign and the vast majority of those who voted for them did so not to revisit the debates of the past but because they wanted to move on.

Many wanted to resume contributing more directly to Canada’s federal life to help craft a progressive alternative to the Conservatives.

A survey commissioned by the now-defunct Canadian Unity Information Office a few years ago revealed that a majority of Quebecers refused to identify themselves as federalists or sovereigntists.

Large numbers of them want out of that particular box.

These days, former PQ minister François Legault is trying to create a rainbow coalition of sovereigntists and federalists at the provincial level. Polls show that a plurality of Quebecers would be inclined to support such an ecumenical party.

To all intents and purposes, those who leaked details of interim leader Nycole Turmel’s past links with the Bloc are playing a longer game than that of embarrassing the NDP at a time of relative fragility.

For the moribund Bloc, the best hope for revival lies with a successful demonstration that there is no room within Canada’s national parties for nationalist Quebecers — or at least not unless they are willing to atone for the way they exercised their voting franchise in the past.

It looks like sovereigntist strategists can count on outside help to achieve their purpose.

Alone of all members of Parliament, Quebec’s New Democrats are being asked to account for their past political leanings.

Some self-appointed high priests of federalism have gone as far as suggesting that a public recanting of anything that smacks of a sovereigntist belief is also in order.

Presumably, they rather than the voters who elected those MPs to the House of Commons would be the judges of what amounts to a high enough level of federalist rectitude.

The exercise suggests that the action of offering one’s candidacy for a federalist party — a bid that bucked every pre-campaign polling trend in Quebec last winter — does not speak louder than words.

Many of the Quebecers who supported the Bloc until last May did so out of a sense of rejection of their collective difference that stemmed from the 1990 demise of the Meech Lake Accord.

Now, as then, a Quebec oui to Canada is getting lost in translation.

Origin
Source: Toronto Star