Support for sovereignty has slumped because Quebecers in favour of independence are too fearful of losing a third referendum, a top Parti Québécois minister and strategist insists.

Jean-François Lisée, the PQ’s minister of international relations, said it is an upsetting realization for the PQ, whose raison d’être is Quebec’s eventual independence. But it is one that he and party leader Pauline Marois have come to accept over the course of the provincial election campaign.

“Right now there are those who are for sovereignty, but they don’t think we’ll win and so they don’t want a referendum,” Lisée told reporters Friday morning.

“For sure it’s saddening, but I think there is a big worry about losing and we share that worry. It’s legitimate. When we go, when Quebecers are ready . . . it will be to win.”

Nearly 20 years after the last referendum vote in 1995, one that was defeated by a razor-thin margin, the matter remains explosive.

Support for Marois’s party vanished after less than two weeks of campaigning that had been dominated by her musings about a sovereign Quebec’s borders, currency and passport and the declaration of former Quebecor president Pierre Karl Péladeau, now a star PQ candidate, that he wanted to “make Quebec a country.”

The enthusiasm turned the campaign on its head and allowed Philippe Couillard’s Liberal party to surge into the lead. Only one-third of Quebecers say they want independence, according to opinion polls.

This seems to have been reflected in Péladeau’s most recent line Friday when he said on the LCN network that his goal in entering politics was “to have economic sovereignty, to ensure that we will have a (strong) economy.”

Independence may be a distant dream, but it remains a current threat for the PQ. That understanding was what prompted Quebec’s chief electoral officer, Claude Drouin, to urgently retract the words of a spokesman that appeared in Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil Friday morning, saying that a PQ majority on April 7 would trigger immediate preparations within the agency for a referendum.

There are, Drouin said, “no plans or intention whatsoever of preparing for the holding of a referendum in a hypothetical future or according to any timetable whatsoever.” Even if another sovereignty vote was on the horizon, he said the provincial law setting out the rules for a referendum would first need to be updated.

Whether it was political strategy aimed to dampen talk of independence or a true statement of his disappointment, Lisée said he has been profoundly affected by the opposition to the PQ’s founding proposition.

“I’ve always been an optimist on sovereignty, but I’ve rarely been as pessimistic as I am right now. I’ve been struck by the signal that has been sent by Quebecers since the start of this campaign,” he said.

Only a week ago, the former academic and adviser to PQ leaders Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, was warning university students in Montreal that a vote for the left-wing sovereigntist party Québec Solidaire risked delaying and possibly erasing any chance of a referendum in the next four years.

Now, he acknowledges that voters want the next government to concentrate on everyday issues like the economy, the boosting of francophone language and culture with new language laws, and the popular but controversial charter of values, which would ban public servants from wearing religious symbols in the workplace.

To that end, Marois promised on Friday to reintroduce legislation to bolster French language laws in Quebec, including applying Bill 101 to provincial colleges, known as CEGEPs, so anglophone students leave school with a mastery of French and prevent French students being siphoned off into the English school system. The initiative would also force businesses that demand their employees speak English to prove the requirement is really necessary.

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For now, the only sovereignty initiative the PQ is sticking to is a round of consultations on “the future of Quebec”— an attempt to gauge support for independence and a chance to bring attention to Quebec’s grievances with Ottawa.

“But with us the future is open,” Lisée added. “If, in the next four years, Quebecers decide that they have the desire, the future is open. If it’s a Liberal government and they get that same desire, it won’t be an option.”

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