Quebec Premier François Legault seems to have concluded that having a Liberal minority government in Ottawa serves his purposes as he embarks on his on quest for re-election in 2022.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has spent the past year courting Quebec voters with a series of counterintuitive – for the son of Pierre Trudeau – concessions on language and culture aimed at capturing additional seats in the province that may hold the key to a majority government.
Now that the election campaign is officially under way, however, Mr. Trudeau is discovering that this strategy may be undermining his chances of winning the majority he covets so much. Quebeckers are being told, by Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet among others, that having a minority government in Ottawa has proved useful in a province that often views federal-provincial relations as a transactions-based exercise in securing more autonomy and cash.
Indeed, the Liberals have bent over backward since the last election to accommodate Quebec Premier François Legault, who helped revive the Bloc’s fortunes by tabling a list of “demands” during the 2019 campaign that shaped the vote’s outcome.
At the top of Mr. Legault’s 2019 wish list was a request that the federal leaders explicitly agree not to join a constitutional challenge to Bill 21, the 2018 legislation that prohibited provincial employees in a position of authority from wearing religious symbols on the job. Then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer complied. So did New Democratic Leader Jagmeet Singh.
Mr. Trudeau vacillated, only saying he had no plans “at the present time” to join a then-nascent court challenge to Bill 21. Most Quebec commentators took his response to mean that a Liberal government would almost certainly contest Bill 21 at a later stage in the judicial process, at the Quebec Court of Appeal or Supreme Court of Canada level. Mr. Blanchet took that idea and ran with it. The Bloc ended up taking nine seats from the Liberals in the last election, winning 32 ridings overall and reducing the NDP to a single seat from the 16 it won in 2015.
The Liberals will likely need to recapture most, if not all, of the seats they lost to the Bloc in 2019 if Mr. Trudeau has any hope of winning a majority government on Sept. 20. He certainly cannot afford to lose any of the 35 Quebec seats the Liberals won in the last election. But that could prove a tall order as the Bloc seeks to topple vulnerable Liberal cabinet ministers Jean-Yves Duclos (Québec) and Diane Lebouthillier (Gaspésie–Îles-de-la-Madeleine). Mr. Blanchet has set an ambitious goal of winning 40 seats overall, including a few now held by the Conservatives.
The Bloc would also dearly love to recapture its former fief of Laurier–Sainte-Marie, which fell to the NDP in 2011 after more than two decades in the Bloc fold. Environmentalist Steven Guilbeault, a star Liberal candidate in 2019, remains favoured to hold the riding, thanks to his high-profile role as Heritage Minister. His riding sits in the heart of Montreal’s Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood, which is home to a large swath of Quebec’s cultural intelligentsia. And the cultural elite is solidly behind Bill C-10, the legislation Mr. Guilbeault tabled to force foreign internet giants to dedicate a portion of their Canadian revenue to domestic content creation.
Ultimately, the outcome of the Sept. 20 vote in Quebec may depend on whether Mr. Legault decides to play kingmaker. The Premier has promised to table a new list of demands to the federal party leaders during this campaign. Mr. Blanchet is champing at the bit to make Mr. Trudeau’s opposition to Bill 21 an election issue. Mr. Legault has yet to signal whether he will seek to tip the scales by weighing in on the matter.
So far, Mr. Legault seems to have concluded that having a Liberal minority government in Ottawa serves his purposes as he embarks on his on quest for re-election in 2022. The Premier has appeared alongside Mr. Trudeau at several events in recent weeks, including the Aug. 5 announcement that Ottawa would provide $6-billion over five years to help fund child care in Quebec, whose universal daycare program serves as the template for the Trudeau government’s proposed national $10-a-day plan. Mr. Legault might have held out for more money. Instead, he appeared content to tag along as Mr. Trudeau sang the praises of co-operative federalism.
The Premier has also milked Mr. Trudeau’s generosity in recent weeks to secure more federal funding for Quebec’s aerospace sector, affordable housing and high-speed internet services. Mr. Legault conspicuously refrained from criticizing Mr. Trudeau over the $5.2-billion federal bailout of Newfoundland’s disastrous Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project, despite the pressure from Quebec opposition parties to do so. Mr. Legault has not yet got Mr. Trudeau to increase the Canada Health Transfer on a permanent basis, one of his demands in the 2019 election.
Still, the campaign is young. And Mr. Trudeau’s fate on Sept. 20 may lie in Mr. Legault’s hands.
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