Parti Quebecois supporters cheer as results come in at PQ headquarters on election night in Montreal, on Oct. 5. The PQ leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has pledged to delay a referendum vote until after Donald Trump leaves office.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
It is hard to convey how thin a mandate the Parti Québécois has just won in Quebec, but I will try.
With 28 per cent of the vote, the PQ’s popular vote share is the smallest for any winning party in any election, not just in the modern history of Canada but, as far as I can tell, in any comparable democracy. The PQ’s winning share was less than it received in losing seven previous elections; less than it received in 2007, when it finished third.
And yet, thanks to a five-way vote split and the distortions of first-past-the-post, it has not only won power, but very nearly a majority: At 59 seats, it fell just five short. That’s the good news, I suppose. But it hardly matters. That the PQ did not win a majority will not stop it from using the powers to which it now has access, in any way it can, to promote the separation of the province.
That will probably not extend to holding a referendum, or not just yet: The PQ leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has pledged to delay it until after Donald Trump leaves office. But he will spend every day from now until then working to create the “winning conditions” for one.
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We have been here before, of course: in 1980, and 1995. But there’s a difference this time. The 1980 referendum sought only “a mandate to negotiate” secession, or rather “a new agreement” with the rest of Canada; a further referendum was promised to approve whatever was or was not negotiated.
By 1995 the question had become whether Quebec should “become sovereign” after having “formally offered” a “new economic and political partnership,” regardless of whether that offer was accepted.
The failure of that referendum, by the narrowest of margins, led to the Secession Reference, in which the Supreme Court ruled that secession could not lawfully be achieved except by amending the Constitution – though the rest of Canada would be compelled by a mysterious “duty to negotiate” by a referendum with a “clear majority” on a “clear question.” The Clarity Act later forbade the federal government from entering into negotiations unless these conditions were met.
But the PQ has never accepted any similar obligation on its part. It insists it is sufficient grounds for independence that a referendum pass, on a question of its choice, and with a mere 50 per cent plus one of votes cast. Neither would this be contingent on amending the Constitution, or any new arrangement with the rest of Canada.
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Instead, the PQ would simply declare independence unilaterally. The referendum itself would be preceded by the drawing up of a provisional constitution for an independent Quebec, so as to make the eventual vote seem like a mere formality.
In short: utter lawlessness. The PQ proposes to defy the Supreme Court, ignore the Constitution, and step outside the rule of law. Secession would be effected, not by negotiation, but by revolutionary edict. And while that prospect might once have been expected to terrify Quebeckers, much work has been done since to inoculate them to the idea. Much more work will be done in the months to come.
It’s not just the repeated, almost casual use of the notwithstanding clause, as a means of eviscerating the Charter of Rights: the subject of a pending Supreme Court ruling.
There is also Bill 96, which purports to give Quebec powers over language that, under the Constitution, it does not possess. There is the purported abolition of the oath to the King that members of the Quebec legislature, like the members of every other legislature in the country, are constitutionally obliged to swear. And there is the promised attempt to abolish the monarchy itself, at least within Quebec.
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The point, in every case, has little to do with the particulars of each, or even with sowing conflict with the rest of Canada. The point, rather, is to establish the broader principle that the Constitution of Canada – not just the Charter: the whole thing – does not apply in Quebec, except as and when the government of Quebec decides it should; and that therefore the government of Quebec has only to renounce it for the province to be released altogether from its bounds. And since no one on the federal side ever pushes back, why wouldn’t Quebeckers assume this was true?
That is the project on which the PQ has now launched the province: first the discrediting of the Constitution, then the referendum, then the declaration of independence. And it will do all this with 28 per cent of the vote.