Last Wednesday, the federal government announced it would replace Montreal’s Champlain bridge — the country’s busiest — at a projected cost of about $5 billion, hopefully before the current bridge crumbles into the St. Lawrence River. Just a few days before, Stephen Harper himself announced a long-awaited deal to transfer $2.2 billion to Quebec in compensation for tax harmonization.
Is this the start of a new charm offensive toward La Belle Province?
Hardly. Even if Harper’s Conservatives are getting into the business of bridge repair in Quebec, it would be quite a stretch to conclude they intend to rebuild political bridges with the province that snubbed them on May 2.
In the case of the HST compensation, the payment was vastly overdue, as Quebec harmonized its sales tax with the GST 17 years ago.
As for the bridge, it is the property of the federal government and its advanced state of disrepair has been well documented. The government intends to cede the bridge’s construction and operation to a public-private partnership, which it claims won’t cost Canadian taxpayers a penny.
These decisions were welcome, but why wait so long? Why did the Conservatives not seize the opportunity to finalize them officially before the federal election, when we already knew what we know now about these two issues?
Harper’s decision to delay the announcements suggests that he judged he had more to lose elsewhere in Canada by appearing to make “concessions” to Quebec in the middle of a campaign than he could gain in the province.
It is also revealing that the Harper government chose to make these announcements when several other provinces, notably Ontario, were in the midst of election campaigns, which insured that virtually no one would be paying attention.
Indeed, evidence that Harper’s new majority government cares precious little about the preferences of the mainstream Quebec electorate is steadily piling up.
For example, the Tories’ get-tough approach to crime goes squarely against the prevalent consensus in Quebec. Ottawa will help Newfoundland build power lines to compete directly with Quebec’s electricity exports. The planned expansion of the House of Commons will further reduce Quebec’s relative weight. And, of course, the Conservatives are embarked in a crusade to affirm Canada’s link to the British monarchy, which most Quebecers view with a mix of derision and disbelief.
As Harper’s Conservative government sets out to reshape the country in its image, Quebec’s distinctiveness is destined to become increasingly irrelevant.
Even if they don’t court Quebec, the Conservatives can probably count on gains in up to two dozen traditionally “small-c conservative” old-blue Quebec ridings, where their low-tax, small-business-friendly policies strike a sensitive chord, and where the NDP is unlikely to remain a force in the post-Layton era.
To make these gains, the Tories probably won’t have to make any effort to appeal to the province’s traditional demands or to any version of its “distinct” collective interest. A sentence or two in French at the beginning of every speech by the Prime Minister should do the trick.
Quebec’s relative power inside the two major opposition parties is also unlikely to amount to much in the near future.
In the NDP, the party bigwigs’ decision to maintain the existing rule of “one member one vote” instead of favouring regional balance will clearly disadvantage Quebec, which accounts for only 2 per cent of NDP members.
Thomas Mulcair has hesitated to jump into the leadership race because he knows all too well how difficult it will be for him to build from his Quebec base in a party that ignored the province for so long in the past.
On the Liberal side, no serious Quebec candidate seems to be among the potential front-runners and the Liberal organization in Quebec shows few signs of recovering from the scandals that brought it down nearly a decade ago.
Ironically, in the old days of Pierre Trudeau, Quebec power in Ottawa was hailed as the best rampart against separatism. But now that the sovereignty movement is teetering on the verge of collapse, this power is weaker than ever.
Pierre Martin is a professor of political science at the Université de Montréal.