Kevin Paquette: Quebec’s Conservative revolution is only just beginning

The Parti Québécois will form Quebec’s next government, and strangely, that is not the most interesting story of this election. One might think that electing a sovereigntist government that promises nothing less than a referendum on Quebec independence in its first term would, on its own, be the most significant political upheaval of this election. But it is instead the emergence of a new political force that could reshape Quebec politics in important ways.

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Monday night, for the first time in more than 90 years, the Quebec Conservative Party elected members to the National Assembly. And not just a handful, but 19, with more than 20 per cent of the vote. Éric Duhaime will enter the salon Bleu in a big way.

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This new reality, combined with the annihilation of the Coalition Avenir Québec, which now finds itself with no seats at all, signals a paradigm shift in Quebec’s political landscape.

For a long time, centre-right voters in Quebec had to make compromises. They voted for the Action démocratique du Québec, and then for the CAQ, because, at different moments, those parties came closest to their convictions while still having a real chance of taking power. Former CAQ premier François Legault had, after all, built his party around a sometimes-unlikely coalition of former Péquistes, former Liberals and more conservative voters.

As long as the CAQ was winning, it was easy to put those internal contradictions aside. But they became much harder to ignore once things started going badly.

Éric Duhaime understood that a part of this electorate was available.

That means these voters no longer have to settle for being a faction within a broader political coalition. Quebec centre-right Bleus voters now have their own political vehicle.

The arrival of the Conservatives in the National Assembly now changes a lot of things.

During the CAQ’s eight years in government, the main parties facing Legault and his government generally tended to attack it from the centre or from the left, particularly when it came to public spending, government services or social policy.

Systematically, the government was pushed to spend more, create a new regulation or intervene in a particular situation.

No one ever questioned the role or relevance of the government in certain services, or the merits of certain regulations.

That era is now over. With a real Conservative caucus, there are now certain questions that will become impossible to avoid in the National Assembly.

Why does the government need to spend money in certain areas? How many public servants are actually necessary to provide good public services? How far should certain environmental regulations go? What role should the private sector play in health care? Should Quebec develop its natural resources? Why should Quebec remain so reliant on equalization payments?

People may agree or disagree with Duhaime’s positions on these issues, but the Quebec government will now have to answer these questions. Moreover, in a minority parliament, the PQ will not be able to simply listen politely before using its majority to move on. It will have to reach agreements with the opposition parties. And if the election campaign is any indication, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon may sometimes have more in common with the Conservatives than with the Liberals or Québec solidaire.

But we have to be clear-eyed: this new influence comes with enormous risk for the Conservatives. They have no room for error.

Almost the entire caucus, with the exception of Maïté Blanchette-Vézina, a former CAQ minister elected in capital region riding of La Peltrie, and Caroline Simard, a former Liberal MNA elected in nearby Charlevoix–Côte-de-Beaupré, has no parliamentary experience. Within a few weeks, these new MNAs will discover the basics of question period, parliamentary committees, the media scrums, and party discipline.

They will have to learn quickly to act like a party that eventually aspires to govern, rather than like a collection of rookies who just won their first election, even if that is exactly what they are.

The Conservatives will not have four years to learn the workings of parliamentary life. Because Monday’s result shows something fairly obvious. If the PQ wants to turn its minority government into a majority government, the Conservatives are directly in its way. They are now the PQ’s main opponents in several regions of francophone Quebec, particularly in Mauricie, Centre-du-Québec, the Eastern Townships, Lanaudière and rural Montérégie.

That is why the real work for Duhaime and his team begins now. He will have to show that he can turn this new political force into a party disciplined, credible and serious enough to consolidate the bases he has just built and make gains in new regions, particularly in Montreal’s North and South Shores.

Above all, he will have to prove that the PCQ was not simply the vehicle for an anti-CAQ protest vote, but that it can also durably reclaim the role of third way once occupied by the ADQ and then the CAQ.

So yes, the arrival of a sovereigntist government in Quebec City is important news. It will definitely open a new period of uncertainty in Canada.

But it is probably the arrival of an organized conservative right, represented in the National Assembly, that has the greatest potential to transform Quebec’s political landscape over the long term. Duhaime may just have changed the political game in Quebec.

Kevin Paquette is a consultant at Crestview Strategy. He was a political advisor to Quebec’s Minister of Public Security and president of the Coalition Avenir Québec’s youth wing. 

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