All French-Canadians, to different degrees, are nationalists. All of them, without exception.
—Brian Mulroney, in 2013, on the people of his home province of Québec.
The late prime minister, the last Conservative leader to win a majority of seats in Québec, believed that being a nationalist was an honourable position in the province, and reflected the efforts of the Québecois to preserve their language and culture in a mostly English-speaking continent. Mulroney was clear that not all Québec nationalists are separatists, and that many seek a more autonomous, decentralized accommodation within Canada. His efforts to accommodate these more moderate nationalists helped the Conservatives win a landslide victory in 1984; they also helped blow apart the party a decade later.
But this is not 1993, when constitutional battles destroyed the old Progressive Conservative coalition. Québec’s sovereignty debate has not disappeared, but it has dissipated and the spectre of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords should be firmly in the Conservatives’ rearview mirror. Appealing to nationalist voters, who are in any case more aligned with and receptive to their message, remains the key for the Conservative Party in Québec.
The Conservatives cannot count on replicating historical anomalies like the 2011 election, when Jack Layton’s NDP took so much of the Liberal vote, to consistently win a national majority. And relying on the current enmity for the Justin Trudeau Liberal government will work only once. Even if Québec is not the ultimate kingmaker anymore, it is still the province that can determine whether a party wins a minority or majority government. And Canada is still a country created on the principle of two founding peoples; conserving that means becoming a party for both English and French Canada.
Greater success for the party within Québec must come from Pierre Poilievre’s leadership. It cannot be sought through an alliance with existing provincial parties or through a powerful Québec “lieutenant”. It will require crafting a nationalist narrative that is associated with his personal brand, one that goes beyond offering a specifically tailored platform during an election season.
Thankfully, it does not also mean abandoning the Conservative Party’s core principles. The Liberals’ deficit-happy, big-state policies have failed to deliver a good life for Canadians, and people in Québec are hurting just as much as others in Canada. They are seeking alternatives to Trudeau’s nearly decade-old government. For the Conservatives, a winning blend in Québec includes both their promise to “bring home” economic prosperity and a strong, consistent nationalist message. Its success will be confirmed if Québec’s moderate nationalists start asking themselves why they would ever choose the Bloc Québecois over the Conservatives as the champions of a more autonomous Québec.
Québec’s Enduring Nationalism
In his latest book, Le Retour des Bleus, Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard describes a strain of conservative nationalism in Québec dating back to the 19th century. It is essentially a resistance to liberal progressivism, which wrote off Québec’s French-speaking citizens as a backward people who needed to assimilate into modern British culture. The famous report in 1839 by Lord Durham, a Whig reformer and Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, exemplified this drive for assimilation: “This French Canadian nationality…I know of no national distinctions marking and continuing a more hopeless inferiority…It is to elevate them from that inferiority that I desire to give to the Canadians our English character.”
Conservative, or bleu, nationalism is rooted in what is today known as “common-good” conservatism, and seeks to protect Québec’s cultural heritage from fragmentation through assimilation into a progressive, modernist, post-national world. At a time when “nationalism” is often seen as synonymous with bigotry and extremism, it’s important to understand Québec’s nationalism as concerned with preserving language and culture. The same impulse guides its push for more autonomy on key issues like immigration; that’s why Québec nationalists are not all, or even mostly, separatists.
Many people mark 2018 as the year conservative nationalism returned as a strong force in Québec politics, when François Legault’s centre-right, autonomist Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) won its first majority government. But there is a strong case to be made that it actually re-emerged in 2007, when the Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) came within seven seats of toppling Jean Charest’s provincial Liberal government.
Led by Mario Dumont, the ADQ ran on a platform of greater autonomy for Québec, tighter spending and cultural nationalism, attracting a mix of conservative federalists and nationalists. While leader of Québec’s official opposition, Dumont called for the creation of a dual-citizenship program for the province and for “repatriating all political, economic, cultural and social levers necessary for Québec’s development.” While the ADQ failed to replicate that success in the next election, it would merge in 2012 with François Legault’s new CAQ, which went on to form majority governments in 2018 and 2022. After six years in government, it is safe to say that Legault’s big-spending CAQ is far less conservative on economics than the ADQ promised to be, but it has been conservative on culture.
Critics who accuse Québec nationalists of fomenting bigotry and xenophobia are ignoring the efforts made by Québec’s government to help new immigrants acclimatize to the French-speaking province through language programs, while asking them to participate in Québec’s unique culture.
The CAQ has strengthened the province’s French language laws, mainly by limiting access to government services in other languages, and attacked the Trudeau Liberals for their attempts to centralize power in Ottawa at the expense of the provinces. Premier Legault has, for example, accused the federal government of encroaching on Québec’s jurisdiction through conditional transfer payments related to areas like childcare, healthcare and immigration. It also recently enraged multiculturalist critics in Montréal after announcing plans to establish a museum for the Québecois nation that rejected a post-nationalist narrative of Québec’s history, instead presenting a vision which, as Legault put it, would “show the history of the nation that was French-Canadian and now Québecois, that started with Champlain.”
It’s true that the CAQ’s approval rating has fallen sharply in the past year, due to errors like abandoning, then re-adopting, promises to build a new bridge or tunnel in the Québec City region, pledging subsidies for NHL pre-season games, and running historically large deficits in an inflationary period. Some analysts have attributed the party’s growing unpopularity to espousing too much nationalist rhetoric while not implementing enough nationalist legislation, with the blame being mostly placed on Legault’s shoulders.
Still, it’s clear that nationalism is a dominant ideology driving Québec’s politics, and this fact needs to be accepted by the rest of Canada. Critics who accuse Québec nationalists of fomenting bigotry and xenophobia are ignoring the efforts made by Québec’s government to help new immigrants acclimatize to the French-speaking province through language programs, while asking them to participate in Québec’s unique culture. As Sean Speer, editor-in-chief of the Hub, has written, while people are free to disagree with cultural conservatism in Québec, it cannot be ignored.
Choosing to make an alliance with Québec’s nationalists may mean alienating many anglophone Quebecers who are unhappy with the province’s language laws. The language laws are, however, the reality in Québec, and are primarily a provincial jurisdiction.
Fertile Ground for Conservatives
The Conservative Party’s bread-and-butter proposals – a smaller federal government, supporting small business by cutting red tape, lowering taxes across the board, and supporting the military and families – are undeniably popular in a significant chunk of Québec.
Indeed, the suburbs and small towns around Québec City, and the Beauce region south of the city, have everything a small-government party is looking for. Canadian Forces Base Valcartier is the largest military facility in the province; including reservists, about 9,000 people work there, making it one of the area’s largest employers. Football is wildly popular, with the Université Laval’s team being one of the most successful in the country. In the Beauce, small- to medium-sized businesses and manufacturing are the lifeblood of the economy. Throw in Québec City’s famous right-wing radio hosts, and you have a place not completely unlike a Republican red state.
Canada’s own “red state”? The suburbs and small towns around Québec City and the Beauce region to its south have everything a small-government party is looking for: the province’s largest military base, CFB Valcartier (top left), a love of football, especially the successful Université Laval’s team (top right), small- to medium-sized businesses and conservative radio commentators like Éric Duhaime (bottom right). (Sources of photos (clockwise from top-left): CBC Montréal; The Queen’s University Journal; Radio-Canada/Marie-Eve Cloutier; Beauce Art)
Federal Conservative voters in these two regions are an important part of the CAQ’s coalition. CAQ staff have been hired by Poilievre’s Conservatives while sitting CAQ Members of the National Assembly have announced they will run for the Conservatives in the next federal election. What success the federal party has had in Québec in recent elections has come from this region, but it has never resulted in more than 12 seats and has always fallen short of 20 percent of the province’s voters.
Outside of Québec City’s suburbs and the Beauce, the Conservatives have been unable to make inroads. Changing that will be a challenge, but it can be done. Choosing where to expend time and resources is crucial. Attempting to win over federalist Liberals in urban Montréal is as useful as trying to win in downtown Toronto. Those ridings may be “rented” when the Liberals are truly down in the dumps, but they are unlikely to be retained beyond one election cycle.
The real gains are to be had in rural and small-town Québec, such as in the 200 or so kilometres between Montréal and Québec City, which have been dominated by the avowedly separatist Bloc since 2019. To the south of the St. Lawrence in the Eastern Townships are other ridings where the Conservatives are polling respectably, even if they are not yet in a position to win. North of Québec City, in places like former Mulroney minister and Bloc founder Lucien Bouchard’s former seat of Lac-Saint-Jean, are other ridings where Conservatives have seen their popularity grow.
Nationalist parties like the CAQ and ADQ have found great success in these areas. Unlike Montréal, this is not a post-national region but part of the heartland of the Québecois nation, recognized by former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2006. Certainly, there are many hardline separatists in these ridings who will be keen to vote for the Bloc, but there are many softer nationalists who vote Bloc out of default. Conservatives have attempted to win over the nationalist vote before, without much success. Their repeated failures to expand support outside their modest 10 strongholds around Québec City and the Beauce have led to suggestions that the party must get creative. This is correct up to a point.
What Not to Do
During the Harper years, there was great hope that Dumont and the ADQ could help revive the party in Québec through some kind of alliance. It never materialized, to the Conservatives’ disappointment.
Once upon a time, a similar arrangement worked when Québec Premier Maurice Duplessis, a conservative nationalist himself, turned his Union Nationale machine over to John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives in the 1958 federal election. The unilingual anglophone Diefenbaker nearly swept Québec and pulverized the Liberals. By 1963, however, Duplessis was dead, the Union Nationale was out of power and the Liberals’ hold on Québec was reaffirmed with a reverse-sweep of the province. Alliances with provincial parties in Québec have evidently never been a permanent or reliable solution for the Conservatives.
Conservatives have had some terrible luck finding the right man for the job of ‘Québec lieutenant’ in the 151 years since Cartier’s death. During the leaderships of Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark in the 1970s, there were high hopes that Claude Wagner, a high-profile prosecutor and judge, could be the one who could help deliver the province, but to no avail.
Once upon a time, prime ministers relied upon a Québec lieutenant – a member of their Cabinet or other senior MP – to handle their party’s affairs there and serve as a sort of informal co-leader when it came to matters of Québec. The Québec lieutenant played one of the most important roles in the federal government in an era when most prime ministers were unilingual English-speakers of Anglo-Celtic origin. Until 1948, Sir Wilfrid Laurier was the only prime minister of Francophone origin.
For Sir John A. Macdonald, it was Sir George-Étienne Cartier, who successfully communicated the goals of Confederation and convinced French-Canadians that uniting with English Canada to form a new Dominion was the right choice. Following Cartier’s untimely death, the Conservatives replaced him with Hector Langevin. Though a distinguished administrator, Langevin could never rise to Cartier’s stature, nor could his successors.
Decades later the Liberals won the lottery with Ernest Lapointe, who was regarded by many as prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s co-leader and helped the party retain its Québec support through critical issues like conscription in the Second World War. But beginning in 1948, when Louis St. Laurent succeeded King, francophones or those of francophone origin have almost become the norm for Canadian prime ministers. They have led the Liberals for 46 of the 51 years that the party has governed since 1948.
Conservatives have had some terrible luck finding the right man for the job in the 151 years since Cartier’s death. During the leaderships of Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark in the 1970s, there were high hopes that Claude Wagner, a high-profile prosecutor and judge, could be the Québec lieutenant who could help deliver the province, but to no avail. Lucien Bouchard, Mulroney’s hand-picked and carefully nurtured Québec lieutenant, wound up disillusioned with the party’s progress on constitutional issues after serving in that position for only two years. He left in a seismic upset that nearly fractured Mulroney’s caucus, taking with him a handful of MPs and a huge swathe of his fellow nationalists to found the Bloc Québecois, leading to the PCs’ disastrous collapse in 1993.
Reviving the formerly outsized role of the Québec lieutenant may be an intriguing prospect for the Conservatives, but this approach hasn’t worked for them in living memory. And both Canada and Québec have greatly changed since 1945, as for that matter has the practice of politics.
Poilievre has in fact chosen a Québec lieutenant, Pierre Paul-Hus, who is well-suited for the party’s existing base in the province. An entrepreneur and former military officer, Paul-Hus represents Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles, a suburban riding just north of Québec City. (Similarly, the Liberals’ Québec lieutenant, Pablo Rodriguez, is an Argentine-born progressive with a similar background to many in Montréal’s large and growing immigrant population.)
But neither Paul-Hus nor Rodriguez would be mistaken for their party’s most visible face in Québec, as evidenced by Poilievre’s recent early summer tour of the province. Given the power of social media in the mass-digital age, the personality and presence of party leaders is far more salient. The leader’s ability to perform well in the French-language debates is seen as paramount in bridging Canada’s linguistic divide, no matter their background.
It may not be an ideal situation from a constitutional perspective, but prime ministers and party leaders have come to dominate in recent decades, with concentrated powers akin to those of a U.S. president. As Jonathan Manthorpe recently observed in the Walrus, “Political parties are now defined by the public’s perception of their leader. A political party’s brand is not so much the policies it espouses as it is the public image of the leader.” Nor does any sort of co-leader along the lines of Ernest Lapointe have any parallel in modern Westminster-style democracies, and no one should expect one to emerge anytime soon.
This is not to say Paul-Hus will not be an important member of Poilievre’s cabinet, assuming the Conservatives win the next election, and he is already the point man for the Conservatives in Québec. But even Paul-Hus would never suggest he is more important than the party leader. Growing the Conservative Party’s support will, accordingly, be the ultimate responsibility of Poilievre, not of a surrogate of any kind.
The Bloc is the Short-run Target
Poilievre’s predecessors Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole tepidly held out their hands to Québec nationalists, with little to show for it beyond O’Toole’s 2-percentage-point increase in the popular vote and no new seats. Neither possesses Poilievre’s fluency in French, an advantage that has enabled him to go toe-to-toe with Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet in the House of Commons.
The Bloc could be rendered more vulnerable by pointing out the weaknesses and inconsistencies in Blanchet’s leadership. Poilievre did this during a debate in May, specifically attacking the Bloc for its many similarities and even agreement with Trudeau’s policies. “The Bloc Québecois claims to be a separatist party whose goal is to finally get rid of the federal government’s control over the Québec nation and the lives of Québecers,” Poilievre stated. “Then, according to its leader, the Bloc Québecois is a progressive, socially democratic party. It shares the same ideology as the current Liberal Prime Minister.”
Poilievre went on to point out that the Bloc seeks Québec’s independence but insists that the federal Crown Corporation of Radio-Canada is essential to Québec, and that the Bloc voted in favour of Bill C-11, which gave Ottawa greater control over what everyone living in Canada sees. When Parliament re-opens in the fall, Poilievre should make time between his fierce rhetorical attacks on the Liberals to pick up where he left off and keep hammering the Bloc. He’s part way to building that alliance with nationalists already.
The Bloc’s current wave of popularity stems from the same dissatisfaction with Trudeau’s government that has arisen in every other province. There is currently no great debate over language or secularism in Québec for the Bloc to use as a political wedge, and that leaves the party vulnerable to an ascendent Conservative Party.
Building a Cultural-Conservative Alliance
Past Conservative leaders have offered up election platforms to Québec voters that contained good ideas, but simply serving up a menu of items got the party nowhere. There are many clear connections to be made between the Conservatives’ trademark fiscal conservatism and greater autonomy for Québec. Still, a simple, well-thought-out economic platform may fire up accountants and economists, but few others. It is in fusing culturally conservative policies for Québec with the party’s wider platform where the opportunity lies to enhance the party’s chances immensely.
‘This business of deleting our past must end,’ Poilievre said in one of the speech’s most widely shared moments. ‘This is a matter on which English Canada must learn from Québec…Québecers…do not apologize for their culture, language, or history. They celebrate it…’
The Conservative Party has already come out against Trudeau’s vision of Canada as a post-national state with no shared identity. Whatever ideals may have gone into post-nationalist theory, it is an inherently homogenizing force that melts down organically-developed cultures into something indistinguishable and ultimately bland.
Poilievre himself has attacked such post-national notions of history and gave a ringing endorsement of Québec’s cultural conservatism at his party’s convention in Québec City last September. “This business of deleting our past must end,” Poilievre said in one of the speech’s most widely shared moments. “This is a matter on which English Canada must learn from Québec…Québecers…do not apologize for their culture, language, or history. They celebrate it. And all Canadians should do the same.”
Immigration has become a major issue in Canadian politics, with the current government’s authorization of high numbers of temporary workers and international students becoming deeply unpopular not just in Québec but across the country. If the Conservatives form a government and undertake comprehensive immigration reform, devolving more authority to Québec over the number of newcomers allowed into the province would check a huge box.
Whether it is the autonomist Legault or the separatist Blanchet, most Québec nationalists of all stripes seem united in their support for Québec gaining more power over immigration. Grave concerns have been voiced in Québec about the dissipation of Québecois identity and culture in Montréal, where it was reported that both are often ridiculed in the increasingly post-national city’s public schools. Blanchet himself has lamented what he described as the city’s cultural detachment from the rest of the province.
These changes have wrought great anxiety, and the desire to protect something so fundamental as Québec’s cultural identity runs deep. Conservative Party veterans in Québec have said the province’s voters there will support a leader whom they believe understands them, and that they will “vote with the heart”, not just their head. Recall that Trudeau’s 2015 election platform was written off as economic and fiscal nonsense by the Conservatives, but the slogans and emotional promises inspired voters to give him a majority government – including most of the seats in Québec.
A winning Conservative nationalist platform in Québec must include a defence of the Québecois nation and its culture, as well as its language. It may be an opportunity to revive the Confederation principle of Canada as the product of two founding nations, English and French, a principle that speaks to Québec nationalists.
Of course, other provinces may see this approach as special treatment. They may well want their own deals on issues like immigration. Different premiers will have their own priorities, such as Alberta insisting upon respect for its constitutional jurisdiction over energy and natural resource policy. Handling competing demands will be a challenge, but such is the nature of managing a federation. Other provinces asking for similar treatment is not unreasonable, and not out of line with the Conservatives’ general policy of devolving power to the provinces.
Why Québec is Worth the Effort
A question many Conservatives outside of Québec may be asking is; why would the party ever commit so much time and resources to making gains there when they can win a majority solely with seats from elsewhere?
The answer is that just three times throughout Canadian history – in 1917, 1993 and 2011 – has a party won a majority of seats in the House of Commons without a substantial number of seats in Québec.
The Liberals’ shockingly weak showing in the 2011 federal election was a historic anomaly that reduced them to fewer than 40 seats, while Layton’s NDP dominated in Québec. It was not the first time the Liberals had suffered a massive loss only to swiftly recover and return to government in subsequent years with a majority, nor will it likely be the last.
In 1993, Jean Chrétien’s Liberals enjoyed the fruits of the PC’s implosion into three warring parties, winning a large majority via vote-splitting. His party won just 19 seats in Québec while taking 177 out of 295 seats in total. In 1997, the Liberals won a more respectable 26 seats in Québec, and by 2000 they had effectively recovered, taking 36 and winning the popular vote.
In 1917 during the First World War, Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden’s pro-conscription campaign alienated Québec; Francophones in the province were overwhelmingly opposed to mandatory military service. Borden won the election in a landslide after nearly sweeping English Canada, but was almost shut out in Québec and poisoned his party’s brand in the province for much of the 20th century. Borden squandered the party’s strong Québec showing of 1911, which saw the party win 26 out of 65 Québec seats by appealing to nationalists. And it was the Tories’ first national majority since 1896. Had war and the conscription crisis not come along, Canadian political history might have looked much different.
But that is mere speculation. The reality is that the Liberals’ near-monopoly over Québec after 1917 combined with their strength in Ontario ensured that they governed Canada for most of the 20th century. Everything Conservatives dislike about Liberal Canada was the result of their own inability to win elections, much of which was owed to their remarkable lack of competitiveness in Québec.
Why the Conservatives should try to become a real force across Canada’s second-largest province by size, population and seat-count is an easy question to answer. Making that happen, however, is an effort that needs to be led by Poilievre.
Today, the Conservatives must shape their own future in Québec. The upcoming federal election is shaping up to be a wipeout for the Liberal government, perhaps even a 200-seat Conservative majority. The polling aggregate site 338 projects this would be accomplished even while winning fewer than 20 seats in Québec. The site also now has the Conservatives neck-and-neck with the Liberals in the popular vote in Québec, and if that holds, it will be a huge increase from 2021. The uneven distribution of that support, however, means that without a further increase in specific regions, it will not yield a decisive bounty of seats.
If the Conservative Party is serious about perpetuating substantial support in Québec, it cannot rely on anyone but the party and its leader to make that happen. Hopes that help in Québec can come from outside the Conservatives have never ended successfully. Legault’s public support for the Conservatives during the 2021 federal election due to its promise of greater autonomy did not make up for the lack of a concrete, nationalist message from the party and barely moved the needle.
The Bloc Québecois will never govern Canada, and can ultimately only ever exist as a sort of regional protest party. Maybe the Conservatives will have to convince Québec nationalists of their merit by governing well, demonstrating that they should be their first choice by stewarding a better economy and assuring them that the party can help defend the Québecois nation while in government. Or, Québec voters may come around to Poilievre during the next election campaign as they did for NDP leader Layton in 2011, even though Layton was a Toronto politician (albeit one raised in Québec).
In any case, why the Conservatives should try to become a real force across Canada’s second-largest province by size, population and seat-count is an easy question to answer. Making that happen, however, is an effort that needs to be led by Poilievre, a fluently bilingual man with a wife from Québec – and the opportunity of a lifetime.
Geoff Russ is a policy analyst and writer in Vancouver. He is a frequent contributor to the National Post and the Hub.
Source of main image: Anirudh Koul, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
