We need to talk about the Bloc. The Bloc Québecois (BQ), that is.
If you are like me and don’t live in the province of Quebec, you could be forgiven for not spending a lot of time thinking about the pro-sovereignty party that only runs candidates in la belle province. After all, you couldn’t vote for them even if you wanted to, and given that they only contest 78 ridings, they will never form a government in Canada. For all intents and purposes, they don’t matter, right?
Well, as we will see, they actually matter a lot in this election, particularly to two of the parties who can form government: the Liberals and the Conservatives. And this will be increasingly true if, as recent polls have suggested, the BQ continues to lose steam as the election campaign wears on. The Bloc held 32 of Quebec’s 78 seats at the time of dissolution, and may be on track to lose some of those come election night. To understand what’s going on, we first need to understand what the Bloc is.
Building the Bloc
The BQ was formed in 1991 in the aftermath of the failed Meech Lake Accord, which was an attempt by the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney to, among other things, carve out special status for Quebec in Canada’s constitution as the sole majority-francophone province. The failure of that project, compounded by the subsequent failure of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 (which sought to accomplish the same thing as Meech Lake but this time in a Canada-wide referendum), led to a dramatic increase in support for the separatist movement in Quebec. The whole federalism thing just wasn’t working out for them, it seemed. It was in this climate that senior members of Brian Mulroney’s PC government and a few Liberal MPs conspired to form a new political party, whose sole purpose in Ottawa would be to advocate for increased powers for Quebec from the federal government, up to and including full independence. Vive le Québec libre, etc.
It is interesting to reflect on this history when considering the BQ’s place on the traditional left-right political spectrum. on the one hand, the Bloc Québecois’ origin story is largely as an offshoot of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. After all, Lucien Bouchard, the founding leader of the BQ, was a cabinet minister under Mulroney before he defected. Incidentally, it was the large-scale shifting of Québec nationalist voters from the PC party to the upstart BQ (along with the birth of the Reform Party which I wrote about here) that led to the PCs suffering the worst electoral defeat in Canadian history for a governing party in 1993.
Yet on the other hand, from the beginning the BQ has aligned itself closely with the centre-left provincial Parti Québecois (PQ), both at the level of organization and ideology. The PQ was formed in 1968 as the main political vehicle for Quebec’s nationalist aspirations. And while the PQ’s primary objective has always been to promote independence (including holding referendums both in 1980 and 1995 while in government), on most matters of social and economic policy - from child care and post-secondary education to taxes, environmental regulation and state-owned enterprise - the Péquistes have historically tended towards the progressive (at times even activist) left-of-centre. And because of the Bloc’s close relationship with their provincial counterparts, the BQ has had a tendency to parrot in Ottawa what the PQ says in Quebec City. This was especially true when the Bloc was under the leadership of Gilles Duceppe, who came to politics out of the trade union movement.
So is the Bloc a progressive party or a conservative party? And what does all of this history have to do with the 2021 election? Be patient, gentle reader, because there’s more to this story.
When the Bloc Went Orange
You see, the PC Party wasn’t the only one to be ravaged by the fickle Quebec nationalist vote. You may recall that in the 2011 federal election, the New Democratic Party rode a massive “orange wave” into the role of Official Opposition for the first time in that party’s history, nearly tripling their seat count from 36 to 103. Not coincidentally, the Bloc Québecois vote collapsed in that same election, with the Bloc going from 47 seats in Quebec to a mere 4, losing official party status in the process. It’s not hard to see what happened here: the “bloc” (that is, the Quebec nationalist voting bloc) swung en masse from the BQ to the NDP. Of course, many Liberal voters in the rest of Canada jumped ship to the NDP in that election too, but Quebec was the foundation of the house that Jack Layton (RIP) built.
While this had to do with a number of factors including the NDP’s policy position on future independence referendums and a telegenic appearance by “le bon Jack” on a popular Quebec television program, it is also surely a reflection of the willingness of Bloc voters to consider a progressive centre-left alternative, at least at the time. We know now, however, that this love affair was a brief one: the NDP vote withered in Quebec in the next two elections under Tom Mulcair and Jagmeet Singh, respectively. At the time of parliament’s dissolution last month, Alexandre Boulerice was the sole NDP MP remaining in la belle province. Meanwhile, the Bloc has enjoyed a new resurgence under the charismatic leadership of Yves-Francois Blanchet. Perhaps the Quebec nationalists aren’t so progressive after all?
In the chart below, you can see clearly the sudden rise and fall of NDP fortunes in Quebec at the expense of the Bloc, who dominated in Quebec in the first six federal elections they contested since they were formed in the early 90’s. The NDP went from virtual irrelevance to the province’s most popular party almost overnight in 2011.
The New Democrats have fallen back down to something closer to 2008 levels of support in Quebec since the orange wave crested. They may still have a bit of skin in the game when it comes to courting Quebec nationalist voters, though not nearly as much as they did in the last two campaigns, when they had much more to lose.
The CAQ Factor
We need to consider one more piece of the Bloc puzzle before we can finally put the pieces together to answer the question in the title of this article: we need to reckon with the rise of the CAQ.
The Coalition Avenir Québec is the nationalist, right-of-centre party led by the extremely popular Francois Legault that has been in power provincially in Quebec since 2018. The upstart CAQ dramatically upended the status quo of Quebec provincial politics in the last election by dislodging the separatist Parti Québecois as the default alternative to the Quebec Liberal Party. The CAQ succeeded by seizing upon two basic insights: 1) that Quebec nationalist voters are increasingly older and more conservative on economic, fiscal and cultural issues than they once were, and 2) that they were no longer interested in fighting the old battles of the independence movement which brought so much turmoil and economic carnage to the province in the past. And with these insights, Francois Legault perfected a winning political formula: a small-c conservative party, nationalist in character, that promised not to promote independence.
With that formula in hand and sky-high approval ratings, Francois Legault is now, for all intents and purposes, the new face of Quebec nationalism. Yves-Francois Blanchet and the Bloc Quebecois know this well. In both the 2019 federal campaign and the current one, the Bloc leader has effectively morphed his party into a mouthpiece for Legault’s provincial government. And for good reason: he knows which side his bread is buttered on. The voters who supported the BQ in 2019 are, by and large, the same voters who supported Legault’s right-leaning Coalition in 2018. The maps below are a testament to this point.
Compare the 2019 federal election results in Quebec:
And the 2018 Quebec provincial election results:
In case it’s not clear from the differences in how the maps are presented, most of the areas that the CAQ won in 2018 were won by the Bloc in 2019, with a decent showing by the Conservatives too. The Liberals dominate both federally and provincially in and around the island of Montreal - areas where neither the CAQ provincially, nor the Bloc or the Conservatives federally, are competitive. Finally, the NDP was reduced to one federal seat on the east island of Montreal (you probably can’t see it amidst the sea of red that is Montreal as it’s a small, dense urban riding), in the same region where the left-wing eco-socialist Québec Solidaire party is popular provincially.
Making sense of it all
With all of that out of the way, we can now answer the $64,000 question: which party gains from a hypothetical (and possibly real) decline in support for the Bloc Québecois?
Interestingly, it would appear that each of the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats have something to gain. For the NDP, Quebec is no longer the existential question that it was in 2015, but it will be of symbolic importance for them to show that they are still relevant there. While any hope of recreating an orange wave a la 2011 has evaporated, a softening of Bloc support could lead some left-leaning nationalist voters to give the New Democrats another shot - particularly younger urban voters in the dense neighbourhoods of east Montreal. A bad campaign by the Bloc could perhaps put 3 or 4 Liberal-held seats in play there for the NDP.
The Liberals see the Bloc as their main opponent in Québec. By and large, they are not fishing in the same pool of voters - the Liberals essentially have a lock on the staunch federalist regions of west and central Montreal island, the Montreal suburbs, the Gatineau region, and a competitive shot at a few other ridings in the smaller urban centres, while the Bloc dominates in rural and remote regions of the province. When the Bloc is strong, they also win suburban battleground ridings; if not, many of those will fall to the Liberals.
An astute observer will note that the situation the Bloc faces vis a vis the Liberals is strikingly similar to the one the Conservatives face in Ontario and much of the rest of Canada. And we know that the voting base behind the Bloc is largely the same one that rests firmly in the grip of Premier Legault’s small-c conservative Coalition.
This is why when it comes down to it, the Conservative Party has the most to gain from a hypothetical Bloc collapse. If such a thing were to happen, it is very possible that the next “wave” in Quebec would not be orange but blue. That hinges on whether the Conservative Leader, Erin O’Toole, can make a compelling case to Quebec nationalist voters that his is a party of decentralized federalism, that he isn’t too beholden to oil and gas interests in western Canada, and that he has some sympathy for many francophone Quebeckers’ preoccupation with language and secularism laws - or at a minimum, that he doesn’t engage in so-called “Quebec-bashing” over them.
If the Conservatives could cement themselves as the dominant non-Liberal option in the eyes of Quebec voters, perhaps reviving the old Mulroney-era PC coalition, it could put as many as 25 or 30 new seats in play for them. If that were to happen, it would almost certainly be curtains for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.
But O’Toole is not there yet, and in the meantime, he still needs the Bloc to defeat the Liberals in battleground ridings that Trudeau is targeting, if O’Toole hopes to stave off a Liberal majority. Likewise, the Liberals benefit from a splitting of nationalist and right-of-centre votes between the Bloc and the Conservatives in Quebec. And so in a weird, ironic way, neither party can really afford a complete collapse of the Bloc Québecois, as much as they may both wish deeply for the eventual demise of the separatist party.
As to whether the BQ sits on the left or the right side of the ideological benches, perhaps the best that can be said is they go whichever way the political winds are blowing in Quebec. Right now, that wind is blowing decidedly to the right - not unlike in most provincial capitals in Canada right now. As far as the future direction of the Bloc, well, Bob Dylan has your answer.