Sovereignty at Death's Door?

After the Bloc Québécois' historic defeat in the federal election, its provincial equivalent is falling apart at the seams.

Politics in Quebec are reeling once again over the mutiny of four high-ranking members of the provincial Parti Québécois over claims that its leader, Pauline Marois, is more “obsessed with power” than sovereignty. In a masterful column, the Toronto Star's Chantal Hébert writes that “with the PQ at risk of capsizing in an internal storm, the NDP’s Quebec victory on May 2 may have been only the first instalment of the biggest sea change in Quebec politics in four decades.” The mutineers are the old guard of committed separatists, now in their 60s, which is “a time in life when many worry about not squandering their last, best career years on an unworthy cause.” Without an affable mouthpiece like Gilles Duceppe at the federal level to balance Marois' shortcomings, the sovereignty movement is suddenly rudderless when, just two months ago, it appeared certain to win the next provincial election.

The PQ's election chances won't be helped by the four MNAs, who are “totally free to mouth off on anything they please, which could spell further trouble for the party,” notes Philip Authier of The Montreal Gazette. The quartet can turn any issue into a test of Marois' sovereignty bona fides, such as the supposedly non-separatist-related Quebec City arena proposal that prompted their revolt in the first place. And if the PQ can't own the sovereignty issue, what other leg does it have to stand on?

If Marois doesn't survive the revolt, she “will not be the first hard-headed realist to be thrown overboard by the party's purists,” observe the National Post's editorialists. The PQ's stauncher separatists felt much the same about Lucien Bouchard, “who tried to present separatism as the creed of a tolerant and cosmopolitan people” and “sounded the alarm about Quebec's irresponsible spending practices,” before giving up in the face of MNAs who held lofty ideals of what an independent Quebec should be, but not the understanding of how to make it happen. For Marois' efforts at making the PQ appear to be a party capable of governing the country's second-most populous province – and possibly a country some day – she's lost the very people for whom doing so was a lifelong ambition.