{"id":25031,"date":"2014-04-08T07:02:26","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T12:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25031"},"modified":"2014-04-08T07:02:26","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T12:02:26","slug":"its-important-to-understand-the-scale-of-the-calamity-that-has-befallen-the-parti-quebecois","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/04\/08\/its-important-to-understand-the-scale-of-the-calamity-that-has-befallen-the-parti-quebecois\/","title":{"rendered":"“It\u2019s important to understand the scale of the calamity that has befallen the Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells<\/a> on the electoral catastrophe for the PQ in yesterday’s provincial election:<\/p>\n

Its share of the popular vote, as I write this, is solidly below the 28% the party won in 2007 when Andr\u00e9 Boisclair was its leader. This is, in fact, the PQ\u2019s worst election result, in share of popular vote, in 44 years. The only time it ever did worse was in 1970, the first campaign the party ever fought.<\/p>\n

Philippe Couillard did not have a flawless campaign but he has a full majority term to get the hang of premiering. And Quebec usually re-elects incumbent governments once. In fact, Pauline Marois becomes the first Quebec premier to fail to be re-elected since the 1920s.<\/p>\n

But these are garden-variety problems. The PQ\u2019s woes go much deeper still. It is now 15 years since the party won more than 40% of the popular vote; the Liberals did so in 2008 and again tonight. This is because the PQ sits on a policy it cannot sell: secession from Canada. But now it has added a second unsellable policy to its kit bag: a plan to fire librarians and emergency-room physicians if it is possible to tell by looking at them which religious faith they practice.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

On all three policies \u2014 secession, coercive state atheism, and university tuition \u2014 the PQ is stuck between an electorate that doesn\u2019t agree, and a party base that will not retreat. Compounding the near-guarantee of further PQ grief still further is its insufferable belief in its own infallible mind meld with the Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois collective conscience. The PQ knows better<\/em> than anyone on sovereignty, secularism and higher education. Or so its members tell themselves. So it will not abandon policies the broader Quebec population, including much of the francophone majority, finds risible.<\/p>\n

The PQ is in clear danger of becoming Quebec\u2019s Tea Party: a fringe movement in thrall to esoteric mail-order theorists and proud of it<\/em>, ensuring continued defeat and resistant to any attempts to fix it. I won\u2019t be predicting the death of separatism; that\u2019s a clich\u00e9. But I do predict an extended purgatory for a PQ that will wonder, for a very long time to come, why everyone points and giggles when its leaders proclaim the things they believe most profoundly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not sure the Tea Party Wells refers to exists in any form other than media stereotype (although there are lots of individual Tea Party activists who fit the bill), but the rest of the piece strikes me as being pretty accurate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells on the electoral catastrophe for the PQ in yesterday’s provincial election: Its share of the popular vote, as I write this, is solidly below the 28% the party won in 2007 when Andr\u00e9 Boisclair was its leader. This is, in fact, the PQ\u2019s worst election result, in share of popular vote, in 44 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53],"tags":[188,842,113,114],"class_list":["post-25031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-electionwatch","tag-partiquebecois","tag-quebec","tag-separatism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6vJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25032,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25031\/revisions\/25032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}