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Aging Parti Quebecois seeks to rebuild after crushing election defeat

Oct 2, 2018 | 3:45 PM

MONTREAL — The future of the Parti Quebecois, long the pillar of the sovereigntist movement, is shaky after it suffered an unprecedented defeat at the polls Monday.

Eric Belanger, professor of political science and director of McGill University’s Quebec Studies program, said the party’s base is aging. It is made up mainly of baby boomers and a few Generation Xers who were inspired by decades-old events, the 1990 failure of the Meech Lake Accord and the 1995 sovereignty referendum.

“But since then, it’s been all quiet on the constitutional front, so the PQ’s project lacks fuel in a way,” Belanger said. “On top of that, some of the policy positions that have been taken by the PQ in recent years — most notably the Charter of Values — really have turned off the newer generation now, so that we’re facing a party that has been unable to renew itself.”

A few years ago, he wrote in a paper that the PQ was bound to disappear because of its lack of renewal.

Nothing in Monday’s results changed that assessment. The party won just nine seats and obtained an all-time-low 17 per cent of the popular vote. Party officials were left struggling to pinpoint what went wrong for the party founded by Rene Levesque 50 years ago this month.

Guy Lachapelle, a Concordia University political scientist and onetime PQ candidate, lamented the lack of sovereignty talk from the PQ, which promised not to hold an independence referendum during its first mandate if elected.

On the flipside, left-leaning Quebec solidaire talked sovereignty every day — linking independence to the environment and a need to escape the Canadian “petro-state.”

“It seems to indicate that Quebec solidaire is trying to do what the PQ did not: redefine the sovereignty movement  for a new generation,” Belanger said. “The Parti Quebecois denied their raison d’etre, making Quebec sovereign, pushing it to the side, pushing it off the agenda for several years with nothing really clear or appealing to offer in its place.”

Lachapelle said an alliance of some sort with Quebec solidaire to stop splitting the sovereigntist vote is “inevitable.”

The PQ’s Jean-Francois Lisee, who lost his seat Monday and announced his resignation as leader, noted the two sovereigntist parties together accounted for 33 per cent of the popular vote and could have won additional seats if they weren’t working against one another. As it was, Quebec solidaire more than tripled its seat total and finished ahead of the PQ with 10 elected members.

Quebec solidaire rejected a proposed alliance with the PQ in May 2017, wary of the recent instability within the older party. If there were a future alliance, it would be the upstart Quebec solidaire in the driver’s seat.

“We have to wait and see, it’s really too early to call what kind of union,” Lachapelle said.

Speculation has begun about who will be the PQ’s next leader — its third since 2015.

Deputy leader Veronique Hivon was one of only a handful of veterans re-elected, while other potential leadership candidates such as Jean-Martin Aussant and Diane Lamarre lost. Alexandre Cloutier, a younger option the party rejected twice in electing media mogul Pierre Karl Peladeau leader in 2015 and Lisee in 2016, is out of politics.

“There are several options, but an end to the party isn’t the only one,” Belanger said. “At the same time, if nothing changes, you have to wonder whether staying alive will bring any kind of benefit in 2022.”

Peladeau said earlier this year he had not closed the door on a political return, and he has remained vocal on federal and provincial politics. On Tuesday a spokeswoman for Peladeau said he would not be giving interviews on the subject.

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press