The Bloc's Changed In A Permanent Way

On Potentially The Most Important Change In Canadian Politics

If an election was held tomorrow and the polls were right, there’s a very good chance that the Tories would win the most seats, but more importantly the Liberals, the NDP, and the Greens would have less than a majority seats in the House, leading to a Parliament without a clear long term outcome.

In reality, such a House – where the Liberals, NDP, and Greens outnumber the Conservatives but don’t have a majority – would require the Bloc to choose the government. Now, the exact mechanism is slightly more ambiguous (would they publicly say they’d vote down a Liberal Throne Speech and therefore Trudeau would resign? Would it go to the floor like BC 2017 and New Brunswick 2018? Would the Bloc require an explicit deal with either party?), but the de facto outcome of such a Parliament would be the Bloc picking the Prime Minister.

I’ve previously said that the Bloc wouldn’t allow a Conservative government, and based on their history, they wouldn’t – they’ve been Tory antagonist their whole existence, after all. But the problem, and what I missed when I said that, is they were also led by the same guy for 7 of the 9 elections after their 1993 explosion onto the scene. And the problem is, the Bloc of Gilles Duceppe is not the Bloc of today, and I don’t think anyone’s noticed when they’re doing Hung Parliament maths.

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Duceppe’s Bloc was obviously a separatist party, but more interestingly and more importantly it was a left wing one. It made its bones on opposing Chretien, Martin, and Harper on Federal overreach and jurisdiction, sure, but it also attacked all three for being cheap. Duceppe rallied the Bloc to one last impressive performance when things looked shaky in Quebec in 2008 on arts cuts from Harper, and throughout the 90s and 2000s the austerity of Chretien/Martin was in the crosshairs of the Bloc. It’s why the Bloc was willing to toss Harper overboard even into 2009 (after the per vote subsidy was gone) – they wanted a more climate focused, left wing Government than Harper.

The problem is that party died when Gilles Duceppe finally gave up on the party and didn’t lead the campaign into the 2019 campaign. What replaced it was a very different party in its wake – a party not of separation but as the protector of the CAQ and Francois Legault. In doing so, the party stuck to their usual lines about federal overreach and everything else, but it moved the party right on the thorny issues of ethnicity, race, religion, and Legault’s racist piece of shit Bill 21. (Religion is a protected characteristic in this country and whether you like it or not, to refuse service to someone on the basis of a protected characteristic is bigoted, whether it’s the colour of your skin, who you fuck, or what religious deity you pray to.)

The new Bloc is much more muscularly culturally conservative, in line with majority opinion in Quebec on those issues, but the party’s centre of political gravity has moved. In 2000, when they won 38 of 75 seats in the province and narrowly lost the popular vote to Chretien’s Liberals, they won 4 seats on the island of Montreal and 1 seat in Laval. Duceppe’s rendition of the party won the votes of a lot of urban left wingers who voted Bloc because they were a left wing party. Now? The Bloc’s down to 1 seat on the island and they’re shut out of Laval, because those voters now vote Liberal (or for Boulerice). Hell, Duceppe’s old seat is now held by the Liberals.

What’s changed is now the Liberals don’t win Beauce or Megantic or Salaberry, and they certainly don’t win Brome Missisquoi with 50% of the vote or get 48% in Chicoutimi even when they did win it in 2015. It’s a much more polarized map, where the clusters of support are clearer, because the Bloc and Liberals are polarized on a different question now – and that question is one that makes the question of what the Bloc would do in a minority Parliament harder to answer now.

Would the Bloc just blindly put the Liberals in office? I doubt it, because while there are issues to work though in a Tory-Bloc deal now, those differences are mostly about policy, not basic philosophy. Yes, the oil stuff will always get in the way, but the difference is that the Bloc used to view the Harper Tories as essentially illegitimate and weird, on the basis that they didn’t agree with the Quebec Consensus on things, that they didn’t get Quebec, as it were.

This iteration of the Tories will be easily able to find cultural common ground, because now the Bloc and Tories aren’t on an immediate collision course on the central ambition of the Bloc. I’m not claiming Poilievre is any fan of Bill 21, but given his general sense that the Federal Government needs to get out of the way, would the Bloc really find it that hard to do a deal around protecting Quebec’s governance choices from Ottawa’s prying eyes in exchange for swallowing a government that says too many nice things about the oil industry? Probably not as hard as it seemed.

The thing about the Bloc of a decade ago is that it wasn’t that surprising that the NDP under Jack would break through (though, obviously, not to the degree they did), because fundamentally what did the NDP under Layton and the Bloc disagree about? The voters who elected Mulcair in 2008 in Outremont – Bloc voters who came in to beat the Liberal incumbent – were the first tell that this was possible, because there wasn’t much difference except on independence. And with the chances of a referendum fairly remote, this wasn’t a concern.

Now? The Bloc is bleeding votes in seats it used to dominate in, while finding more and more support in places offput by Duceppe’s Montreal leftism. And that makes guessing how they’d go in a post general election dance much harder. In the past, the Bloc were discernibly and inarguably left wing. Now, they’re much more mixed – more culturally conservative, but still economically left wing, with the dose of special, enduring Quebecois exceptionalism mixed in. In classic Canadian fashion, however, since most of the good thinking on this change has happened in a language we Anglos don’t read, it’s gone unnoticed – including, plainly, by me for a while. I was wrong.

The Bloc is very different now than it was under Duceppe, and with the change goes the certainty about what they’d do in a Hung Parliament. We can guess what they might do, but unlike in the past, it’s hard to know who they’d choose if it came down to them (as it might). The new Bloc ain’t the old Bloc, and anyone harboring old assumptions should be disabused of them post haste.