Blanchet’s Artificial Idiocy

On The Stupidest Quote Of The Election

It’s been one of the great tragedies of my life that my grandfather never got a proper eulogy. For reasons, there was only one, delivered by the favoured son, who happened to be the moron of the family. It lasted maybe a minute, talked about “full circle moments”, with the moment being the fact that both my grandfather and my failson of an uncle had played in a charity golf tournament with Jean Beliveau.

I wish I was joking.

I wasn’t asked to deliver one as well but it’s sort of well understood that someone other than the dipshit who did needed to deliver one, and that it probably ought to have been one of the grandkids, who had much less complicated relationships to the man than his kids. Over the decade since that funeral, I’ve thought a lot about what I’d have said, or what I’d want to say now, and I keep coming back to one moment, about two years before he died.

My mother had to go to Laval for work, and she offered me a Friday out from school and a trip downtown after her meeting if I came with, so I took her up on it. We went to a record store on Metcalfe before walking down to Dorchester Square, where my grandfather had worked for decades and where she worked for years while going to school. And in my bad was Live 75-85, 5 vinyl discs of Bruce Springsteen live. That day is the day I realized where I feel truly safe and truly at home.

My mother loves Springsteen, and used to drive my grandfather crazy wearing out Darkness and The River and every other album growing up, and in that moment, staring at the building he worked in, with the music she loves so much, and her beside me, it was nirvana, if you’ll pardon the very bad pun.

So when Yves-Francois Blanchet claims Canada is merely an “artificial country”, I just have to laugh. It’s not funny, but it is fucking hilarious how the man who claims to represent Quebec doesn’t understand his province, his people, and the profound importance of the places he takes for granted.

Oh, and he might have just lost his party a half dozen seats.

..

The problem for Blanchet this whole campaign has been the fact that he’s a Quebec politician doing a national job. That’s usually fine, and it doesn’t really matter that he often has fairly loose understandings of things that don’t really affect Quebec. It’s usually not a problem because Quebec usually has federal elections that are in parallel to the national issue set, where the French debate is maybe 15 minutes about economics and the rest an examination of whatever issues are animating the Quebecor columnist class and whatever wedges the incumbents in Quebec City want to be talking about instead of real problems.

Blanchet is great when the issue set is how Quebec is being disrespected, like when the fucking English debate in 2021 led with a question that essentially amounted to “why are Quebecers so racist” to Blanchet. He’s fantastic when the issues are vague, the answers more hot air than substance, and when he’s able to position himself at the front of an 80/20 issue that is only vaguely described in English press outside the Gazette.

The problem for Blanchet is he’s now facing Quebecers concerned with the issue set of Canada, as opposed to the vague controversies of the past. He’s facing a politician who is (let’s be real about this) much worse than Trudeau at handling the Quebec of it all, but who is taken more seriously than Trudeau at solving big problems. And because Quebecers care more about being able to solve the Big Problem - Trump, Tariffs, and everything that flows downstream from it - they care less than usual about the fact that Carney wouldn’t have a visceral memory of Blue Monday or remember where they were when the ‘94 Strike killed the season.

Carney isn’t being judged on the Quebec of it all in the same way as he normally would be because Quebecers understand that this election is different. This isn’t the time for petty grievances or posturing, this is a time for serious people to do a serious job. They have resoundingly embraced the candidate of doing hard but needed things for a reason, and it is to Quebecers’ immense credit that they have not let issues of aesthetics and oration stop them from choosing who is best to lead them in this time.

The problem for the Bloc is that they don’t have an answer if the question is “who is best to handle these big issues”, so they go to desperate lengths to try and reorient the election onto friendlier terrain. But the problem is, all it will do is remind people how comically useless you are about the question at hand.

This is a not even particularly subtle effort to get the 30% of people currently intending to vote PQ to coalesce around him, instead of the more incoherent and slightly hilarious spraying around of the provincial vote intention to federal parties that’s by definition currently happening. Even assuming he’s getting every Quebec Liberal Party voter, he’s polling at ~40% on average while the QLP is at 20% on a good day. That means Carney’s coalition is a combination of Liberals, QS voters, some of the very few Legault-supporters left, and some PQ supporters too. 14% of the LPC’s vote the last time they polled would vote for independence in a new referendum. Blanchet wants those voters back, and the 21% of Quebec Conservative voters who would back leaving, but he won’t get them.

This is not a referendum, nor an election about having a referendum. Right now that’s not what we’re doing here, and Quebecers are smart enough to know that. It is not some failing that Quebec isn’t prioritizing the national question or Carney’s French or whatever Blanchet would rather talk about, but a testament to them that they can keep two ideas in their heads.

Blanchet needed to try and meet his electorate where they are, not where he wants them to be. He’s mad that his bag of tricks is producing failures and not successes, but he’s really just mad at his own impotence. There’s nothing he can sell Quebecers except distractions and idiocy. He can’t make things cheaper, he can’t deliver outcomes, he can’t save any job except his 32 MPs, and it seems Quebecers don’t have any patience for electing the definitionally useless at a time of crisis.

There is often a myopic view of Quebec in the rest of Canada, a sense that Quebecers are entitled and focused on irrelevances, in large part because the English press fucking suck at making the case that these things matter - or in reporting to English Canada that there are also huge problems in the health and education systems just like in Ontario or Alberta. This election should disabuse a lot of people that Quebec is an island that only cares about the frivolous and the unserious, because it is showing an immense capacity to step up in this moment of crisis.

Blanchet’s wrong about Canada's alleged artificial nature, and his people are the best proof. Quebecers are proving they care about the same issues as Canadians, they bleed for the same country, they care for the citizens of this whole country, and they’re capable of thinking about what’s best for Canadians and not just some narrow self interest. And that’s what has Blanchet so fucking pissed, because a Quebec united in concerns and wanting to contribute to Canadian prosperity is the Bloc’s true worst case scenario. Canada isn’t artificial, Blanchet’s just pissed that Quebecers don’t care about what he wants them to care about.

And in showing his anger about that, all he’s done is show Quebecers and Canadians how little he understands the great province he claims to speak for. It wasn’t just English Canada that got 30% of the fucking country to watch that last Tragically Hip concert together. It wasn’t just Quebec that felt alive in the grips of COVID as the Habs made the Cup Finals on the Baptiste. It’s not just you against us, and Quebecers understand that.

If he’s this desperate for nonsense it’s just proof he doesn’t have an answer, and if I’m a BQ incumbent in a vulnerable seat I don’t understand what my leader just did. He just threw a half dozen Bloc candidates under the bus, made a late swing to the Liberals a possibility, and showed he understands the people he claims to represent less well than a child of the 80s brain drain.

When I listened to that fucking asshole I am technically obligated to call my uncle talk to me about Jean Beliveau I was pissed, because it was so catastrophic unacceptable in the context it was delivered as to be the height of disrespect. This isn’t quite as bad, but it’s not much better. Blanchet is on tilt because he doesn’t understand how to manipulate the people he claims to represent, and it is surely to their credit that the people of Quebec are on course to thoroughly reject him.