The sovereignist party was almost wiped off the map. Under the leadership of Yves-François Blanchet, the tide seems to be turning.
“Good news!” Yves-François Blanchet exclaimed in a tweet last week, linking to a news article about a Léger poll suggesting his Bloc Québécois had overtaken the Conservatives to reach second place in Quebec, behind the Liberals.
Clicking through to the story revealed the Bloc and Conservatives were only one percentage point apart. And the Liberals were still comfortably ahead.
But the Bloc leader does indeed have much to celebrate.
His party had been declared dead after it was almost wiped off the map in the last two elections. Then came the internal discord and mass resignations that marked the brief, tumultuous tenure of unpopular former leader Martine Ouellet.
The tide seems to be turning under Blanchet, a former Parti Québécois minister and TV political commentator. He took the Bloc’s helm in January.
On election day, if his federal sovereignist party garners the 22 per cent support it obtained in the poll Blanchet cited, the Bloc would surpass its 2015 election result by three percentage points. In that campaign, the Bloc took just 10 of Quebec’s 78 seats, two shy of the minimum needed to earn official party status.
That’s a far cry from the heights the party reached in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it had the support of almost half of Quebec voters. But the boost could give it enough seats for a bigger budget and extra speaking time in the House of Commons.
“The change of leadership made a huge difference,” said Guy Lachapelle, a political scientist at Concordia University. But though Blanchet has a political and TV profile, he’s still “a bit of an unknown and it’s his first campaign. The TV debates (in October) will be crucial for him.”
So far, there is no sign the Bloc could regain all the voters who swelled the party’s fortunes under Lucien Bouchard and the early years of Gilles Duceppe’s leadership. The Bloc came back down to Earth in 2011 when voters abandoned the party in favour of Jack Layton and his NDP Orange Wave.
“The Bloc has stabilized things,” said Sébastien Dallaire, a pollster with Ipsos, which found in mid-September that the Conservatives were in second place, two percentage points ahead of the Bloc. “The party is doing better but it’s not doing fantastic.”
Some of the voters who swarmed to the NDP have since returned to the Bloc fold but many others are sticking to other parties, he said.
Complicating matters for the Bloc is the fact that not all the sovereignists running in this federal election felt the need to so under the Bloc banner. The New Democrats, the Greens and even the Liberals have candidates who have advocated for Quebec to separate.
On the plus side for Blanchet, several issues taking centre stage in the campaign are “well-aligned with the Bloc,” Dallaire said.
Two key issues are secularism and climate change.
On secularism, “Quebec Premier François Legault really helped the Bloc by asking on the very first day of the campaign for parties to commit to not helping anyone trying to take down Bill 21 in court,” Dallaire noted.
Bill 21, which bans some government employees from wearing religious symbols, is a very important issue among the Bloc’s key constituency — sovereignists. It gave Blanchet an opportunity to play up his party’s claim that it’s the only federal party that can defend Quebec, Dallaire said.
On climate change — one of the top election issues in Quebec, according to polls — the Bloc is portraying itself as the best party to force Ottawa to take action on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Bloc is portraying other parties, including the Greens, as being “pro-oil.”
“The Bloc doesn’t have to worry about Alberta” and the impact efforts to combat climate change will have on voters’ livelihoods, Dallaire noted. “That allows them to talk about this issue in a very different way than the other parties.”
Blanchet’s overall strategy is to be “the voice of the Quebec government in Ottawa,” Lachapelle said.
It’s rare for a Quebec premier to be as actively involved in a federal election as Legault has been, he added. A nationalist and former Parti Québécois minister, Legault is banking on his popularity to press Ottawa on issues such as immigration, the French language and income tax forms.
And by latching onto Legault’s demands, Blanchet is hoping to capitalize on voters’ high regard for Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec provincial government.
The Bloc is benefiting from the fact that NDP support is in free-fall in Quebec.
And though the Liberals are far ahead in the polls in the province, the Bloc will try to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, Lachapelle said.
That includes Trudeau’s stance on Bill 21 (Trudeau objects to the bill and has not closed the door to contesting it in court), as well as his decision to buy the Trans Mountain Pipeline, a move that does not sit well with environmentally conscious Quebec, Lachapelle said. The growing federal deficit is another albatross for Trudeau.
Campaigning near the Canada-U.S. border on Monday, Blanchet focused on immigration, saying Ottawa should suspend a border agreement between Canada and the U.S. used by tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to cross into Quebec while Trudeau’s Liberals were in power.
Lachapelle said the Bloc will also play up Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s support for pipelines, especially his apparent intention to override Quebec objections and allow a pipeline to be built through the province.
There is a risk voters’ renewed interest in the Bloc could help other parties by dividing the vote, Dallaire said.
The Bloc and Conservatives are vying for similar voters, possibly creating a lot of tight races in swing ridings in central Quebec and in suburbs. Depending on the riding, that could help the Conservatives or Liberals, Dallaire said. The Bloc is not expected to be a major factor on Montreal Island (where the Liberals dominate) or Quebec City (the Conservative’s base in the province).
Nationally, if there’s a minority government, the Bloc could find itself in the enviable position of holding the balance of power, either alone or with other secondary parties, Lachapelle said.
“We have regional politics in Canada now (and) we have minority governments more regularly than before,” he added. “It shows that the interests of voters are more diversified. Third parties are important and can really play a key role.”
As for the Bloc’s long-term future, Quebecers clearly still think the party has a role to play in Ottawa. They want Bloc MPs there to explain Quebec to the rest of Canada and to defend the province against misguided attacks over transfer payments, for example, Lachapelle said.
“The Bloc’s role is also to say, ‘Wait a minute, sovereignty is not dead. It’s still at around 32, 33 per cent, even though we’re not talking about it’,” he added. “So it’s an option that’s still valid democratically.”
