What Will The Bloc Do In A Hung Parliament?

On Possible Minority Scenarios

One of the things I’ve thought about a lot is the possibility that the next Parliament will be decided by Bloc votes. With the NDP falling, it’s always been the case that if the Conservatives could rise to 140 seats or more and the Liberals fall back a bit, the Bloc votes could be the only path to a Parliamentary majority for either side. In this scenario, the NDP and Greens would be irrelevant entirely, side characters in this drama.

Now, constitutionally the Liberals would have the right to try and govern regardless of whether they’re first or second, but in all reality we’d be likely looking at a situation where the most important speech on election night is Blanchet’s. And I think there’s a lot of assumptions being made about where the Bloc would go that don’t hold up.

If you’re the Bloc, you’re opposed to a lot of the energy politics the Conservatives want to enact. The concept of a pipeline running through Quebec with no material benefit to Quebec is antithetical to you. There are reasons of culture - namely CBC/Radio Canada funding, but also general arts funding and grants - that would suggest unease with a Conservative PM who is a budget hawk as well.

(Even with the Conservative promise to keep Radio-Canada funded at the same levels, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell the Bloc ever vote to defund the CBC. The fact is, a robust CBC is good for Radio-Canada, because a lot of times, especially on the news front, English CBC and French Radio Canada are not operating in operational silos.)

But it’s not that simple, and one of the things that is often whispered privately is that there will ever be a third referendum that is finally successful, one of the winning conditions for independence would be a Conservative federal government. The idea is that Quebec would be more likely to give up on Canada as a political project if it was being led by an Oil Sands loving, climate change ambivalent/denialist, Western-focused PM. It’s not a certainty that that argument is correct, but it’s a plausible theory. And if this next Parliament goes four years it’s eminently possible that there’s a referendum in that time. So, would the Bloc want to engineer a government that would make their Provincial counterparts’ chances of winning government rise?

A CPC government hobbled by the Bloc would be quite ineffectual - environmental law would remain pretty much intact, the CBC wouldn’t be defunded, and the worst impulses of the CPC generally wouldn’t come to pass. And it would be an opportunity for the Bloc to signal to Quebec that Ottawa is broken and there’s nothing to be gained from continued Federation. But it would also be a betrayal of (part of) the Bloc’s base.

I’ve written about this before, but the Duceppe Bloc and the Blanchet Bloc are two different parties. Duceppe was a staunch left winger who supported independence in part because it would stop the Canadian government imposing austerity and uselessness on Quebec. He was an environmentalist, he represented a stand of leftist Quebec opinion that wasn’t represented otherwise at a time when the Liberals were austere and tax cut minded. When Nicole Turmel, the interim NDP leader after Jack’s death, was revealed to have been an ex-Bloc supporter, it was a bigger deal outside of Quebec than inside of it, because if you were a progressive in Quebec for many years the Bloc was your only option.

Now, the Bloc are much less committed to anti-Conservative politics. They’re not exactly a right of centre party, but they occupy a different, and broader, place in the ideological fermerment of Federal politics than they used to. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s worth noting that they’re much more anchored outside of Montreal than they used to be and the Liberals are much less successful in Central, Northern, and non-Quebec City Eastern Quebec than they were in 2000.

The problem for the Liberals is that to try and win majority government, they have to go hard at the Bloc. The battleground for majority, as I wrote about on Monday, is Bloc-LPC battles around Montreal. If the Liberals go scorched earth, that could create a lot of bad will that makes the post election period harder. Play nice in an effort to make the post election easier and you increase the chance you need them post election. It’s a catch 22, in a lot of ways.

But the answer that is both true and politically tolerable is that the Liberals don’t necessarily have the Bloc vote under lock in a hung Parliament, and that matters. They’re in a position, with the hollowing out of the NDP’s working class flank to the Tories and the new lines, that the Liberals cannot rely on the NDP being enough to prop them up even if they don’t lose any seats to the Conservatives. So they either have to win seats off the Conservatives (of which there are a handful, but not many, targets), or they need to break into Quebec.

A Conservative government would make the Bloc’s actual ambition - independence - more likely. Or, at the very least, that’s what many believe. I don’t know what Blanchet would do in this spot, but I do know that the blithe assumptions that the Bloc can be counted on as a reliable anti-Conservative party are wrong. It is not a guarantee that so long as the Conservatives fail to reach 172, they can’t govern.