The Quebec Liberals Are A Party Without a Purpose

In Canada, we don’t have a lot of experience with what happens when a political party’s entire reason to exist just falls apart. Parties have died, like the Alberta and BC Social Credit Parties, but they’ve been replaced by reasonable facsimiles over time (even if not by exact matches). But in Quebec, we see a different dynamic – one where the Quebec Liberals still exist, but nobody is particularly sure why.



At the 2018 election, the party both lost government and lost their reason to exist. The party that lead Quebec out of the dark and into the present, the Quebec Liberals had been the answer to nationalist and separatist governments since 1960. If you didn’t want the Parti Quebecois’ yearn for separation (or, from 1960-70, the old Union Nationale), you had to vote for the Quebec Liberals. My two parents, Anglo Montrealers that they were, frequently hated the Liberals, but they always voted for them. It was a necessity for so many people. Now, it’s not.



Instead of René Lévesque or Jacques Parizeau, the new non-Liberal Majority Premier isn’t a Péquiste danger to national unity, but a reasonable, moderate, technocratic leader who by all accounts is getting on with the job of government and isn’t interested in the wild goose chases of independence or another constitutional crisis. Francois Legault, despite being a former Péquiste, is no threat to unity, no threat to Canada, and no threat to good governance in any way, seemingly. His party won a convincing majority in 2018, and would do so again, according to calculations done by Senior Writer Tyler Stephens. That forecast would see the Liberals losing seats to Legault’s CAQ, and it raises a lot of questions. If the enemy isn’t the PQ, and the Premier you’re trying to beat isn’t a figure of universal national hatred, what is the point of the Quebec Liberal Party?



As Tyler has said to me before as him and I have gone back on the forth on the topic, nobody knows. For some, like my parents, it was a party of Anglo rights and Canadian federalism. For others, the PLQ (yes, we will use the French acronym) are the party that can handle the economy well, and for others they’re a liberal party in the sense of the federal Liberals. The problem is, there’s no reason for an Anglo rights party when Francois Legault isn’t threatening the English minority in any way, there’s no purpose to a Federalist Party when in actual substance the CAQ and PLQ would do nothing differently on the constitutional question or handling of the Federal government, and there are issues when the brand of economic competence that some in the PLQ hold so dearly is also a CAQ calling card. To make it worse, voters who want a liberal/left option already have Quebec Solidaire to vote for, so it’s not obvious that that path would reap huge benefits. The Quebec Liberals are at a crossroads, and the grand ambiguity that allowed francophone declinists in the regions to vote for the same party as staunch Anglophone federalists in 2014 is now killing the party.



The party needs to end the ambiguity that served it well for so long and make a decision. It needs to decide if it wants to buckle down and be a party for the National Capital Region and the Island of Montreal, or whether it is willing to be bolder, go farther, and maybe risk their floor for an election winning ceiling. The party is up against a Premier with a 90%+ approval on the handling of Coronavirus per EKOS, so going into the next campaign as they did the last – competent, uninteresting, ideologically uncommitted – won’t work. The CAQ are all the advantages of the Couillard years – good economic managers, smart, reasonable – without the complacency and arrogance of a party that had won 4 of the last five elections. The Liberals need to make a bold offer at the next election if they want to have any form of success. A bold offer on ethics reforms and anti-corruption policy, paired with a big environmental offer – tree planting, higher standards on new construction, government subsidy for electric cars, and a big increase in carbon pricing to pay for a big income tax cut – would put the Liberals on a better level than they currently are on, eat into any lingering doubts people have in the Liberals in a post-Charbonneau world, and cut environment first voters away QS and the PQ.



Continuing to rely on the old way of politics won’t work for the Quebec Liberals. The CAQ aren’t the PQ, and without the unifying force of hatred, the old Liberal coalition doesn’t exist. What can exist, however, is a fundamentally liberal one – one that understands the place for the state in the long standing problem of the next ten years, climate change, while appreciating that Quebecers don’t need total state control. The lane is there, if they want to take if. If they don’t? I’m not sure how low they can go, but they’ll find out soon enough.