The moment it all started going downhill
The moment was designed to seal a PQ majority, but it derailed at least the first half of Leader Pauline Marois’ campaign and created negative momentum the party could never reverse. While Mr. Péladeau comfortably won his seat in St-Jérôme, the PQ lost the election. Badly.
Inside party circles, the feeling was that Mr. Péladeau’s recruitment as a star candidate would solidify the notion that the PQ was presenting the strongest roster of potential ministers to the electorate. But his arrival put the issue of Quebec independence at the centre of the campaign, to the delight of rivals who quickly raised the spectre of a third referendum on sovereignty.
The PQ campaign suddenly looked like it was distraught, making mistakes and improvising. At one point, a reporter addressed a question to Mr. Péladeau, who was standing behind Ms. Marois at a news conference. Mr. Péladeau could have stayed behind Ms. Marois, but he stepped forward. Then Ms. Marois decided to take the question. The image of her pushing Mr. Péladeau back became another defining moment.
Election outcome is not Couillard’s win as much as Marois’s crushing defeat
On the face of it, the Liberal Party’s clear-cut win looks like the political comeback of the year. Who would have bet, just 33 days ago, that Philippe Couillard would become the 31st premier of Quebec? But make no mistake. This is not Mr. Couillard’s win as much as Pauline Marois’s crushing defeat. In fact, things went so wrong for Ms. Marois that it was as if a Liberal strategist had wrapped himself in a Quebec flag and somehow infiltrated the PQ’s headquarters to reshape its game plan to Mr. Couillard’s advantage.
Pierre Karl Péladeau was a dream come true for the Liberals. Never could they have drummed up a more credible threat of a third referendum than the image of the Quebec media mogul with his fist raised high for an independent Quebec. The national question monopolized the campaign’s first two weeks.
The PQ clumsily attempted to bring its charter of values to the forefront. But the support of legendary television host Janette Bertrand backfired and the PQ leader failed to dissociate herself from Ms. Bertrand’s xenophobic remarks. Even some staunch charter supporters cringed when they heard Ms. Bertrand voice fears that Muslim men would have her turned away from her apartment building’s swimming pool.
Survey after survey showed Quebeckers were more preoccupied with jobs, Quebec’s sluggish economy, the province’s health-care network or its staggering debt – “les vraies affaires” or the real issues, as the Liberal slogan had it. This message will resonate loud when the PQ wakes up on Tuesday. It will not be pretty.
All Quebeckers wanted was a normal government. They got it
“Together, we will take care of real problems” was the Liberal slogan. The province that Philippe Couillard’s party has won the right to govern suffers from more than its fair share of real economic, social and budgetary problems – acutely real problems. Mr. Couillard and his team have no magic wand to make them go away, and the campaign was largely not a debate over how to deal with those issues. The Liberals did not win a battle over competing options on education policy, or health, or taxes. The Liberals won because they could promise that in office, they would spend all of their time thinking about those issues. They could credibly promise that they would try to do what normal governments do: govern.
The PQ promised the exact opposite. Yes, Pauline Marois’ PQ tried to insist that separatism was not its real agenda, and it went into the election assuming it could win by temporarily burying its sovereignty obsession. That illusion fell away the moment star candidate Pierre-Karl Péladeau opened his mouth, punched his fist in the air, and announced that he was running to make Quebec a country. Then and there, the wheels started coming off the PQ bus.
The PQ’s desperate attempts to regain the momentum by doubling down on what it saw as its trump card – the mean-spirited, small-minded, paranoiac and allegedly popular charter of values – only made things worse. One of the PQ’s celebrity backers defended it with a delusional rant in which she expressed her fear that rich, Muslim men from McGill would take over her apartment building’s swimming pool. Reasonable Quebeckers were embarrassed. And then a PQ candidate admitted that yes, a law making it illegal to wear a kippah, turban, hijab or other religious symbol while working in a government office, or a hospital, or a daycare, would mean that people exercising their consitutional right to freedom of religion would be fired. Reasonable Quebeckers were aghast.
The election result is not a great victory for federalism; in Quebec, things are never so simple as that. But it is a crushing defeat for separatism. Monday’s election was a referendum on whether Quebec should have a normal government – a government that sees governing as its job. Voters answered that question with an overwhelming “Yes.”
Pauline Marois quits as head of the PQ
Ejected from power, defeated in her constituency , Pauline Marois has decided to leave the helm of the PQ Monday night. The first woman elected at the head of the Government of Quebec is driven from power after a reign of a year and a half, the shortest in history since Confederation. It is also a historic collapse for the PQ which, with 25.4%, recorded the lowest score since his first participation in an election in 1970.
“You will understand that, in the circumstances, I will leave my job ,” said Pauline Marois, visibly moved. “Quebecers have spoken , and we must respect that result. The defeat of our party saddens me probably as much as you, if not more than you. We had so much to offer, so much to do for Quebec, ” she added.
In his victory speech in Saint-Félicien, Que., Mr. Couillard reached out to minorities who felt targeted by PQ policies. “We share the values of generosity, compassion, solidarity and equality of men and women with our anglophone fellow citizens who also built Quebec and with our fellow citizens who came from all over the world to write the next chapter in our history with us,” he said. “I want to tell them that the time of injury is over. Welcome, you are at home here.”
