Early Obituaries For the Bloc and PQ

If a dozen columnists say Quebecois sovereignty is dying, then it MUST be true, right?

The incredible shrinking performances put on this year by the two main Quebec sovereigntist parties, the Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québécois, has led to numerous well regarded political minds to tentatively wonder if this year will mark the death of the mainstream separatism movement. The National Post's Kelly McParland tries to imagine what a Canada would be like where the Bloc isn't “an unfortunate fact of life in Ottawa,” and decides that we're entering “a strange new world. Welcome, but strange.” The sovereignty question has dogged federal politics for four decades, such that most Canadians can't remember a time when it wasn't an issue. The Bloc and PQ implosions, combined with no real alternative beyond a smattering of groups that splintered from the PQ, lead McParland to wonder “how would we have coped with the peace and prosperity of a country that didn't waste so much of its time fighting over mindnumbing constitutional issues?” If all goes well, we suppose we'll soon find out.

In the Toronto Star, Pierre Martin explores the precarious balance that the PQ has had to maintain between its militant and realist wings, concluding that without a leader capable of bridging that gap, the provincial party faces extinction. That's why the Lucien Bouchard/ Jacques Parizeau tandem was so effective in the 1990s, and why Pauline Marois, as professional and pragmatic a politician as the PQ has ever had, has had legions of hardcore separatists abandon the party. “Realists within the PQ have always known that the only way they could demonstrate that a sovereign Quebec could be well governed was by showing that sovereignists could govern well,” an essential facet for winning over the soft nationalists and swing voters who are necessary to make any PQ government viable. Now that Marois has proven she can't even do that, and with no one waiting in the wings to take over the PQ, it looks like smooth sailing for Jean Charest and his motley band of Quebec Liberals.

And in the Ottawa Citizen, Susan Riley notes that the recent rebranding of the navy and air force with the word “royal” was met with little to no opposition from the typically anti-monarchy voices in Quebec. “Could we be at a heady juncture in our national life where quality of health care (abysmal in many places) and economic prospects (uncertain, especially for the young) matter more than the lettering on a warship?,” asks Riley. “It increasingly feels as if the sovereigntist moment is over in Quebec, the victim of generational change as much as economic, or other, factors.” We're a little more cautious about exaggerating the rumours of the movement's death, but the combination of factors listed by Riley make for a good list of its suspected murderers. Youth in Quebec are far less likely today to be sovereigntists than their parents back in the sixties and seventies (to wit: the exodus of top Péquistes is a stream of blue-haired boomers who are closer to old folks' home than university).They're more concerned about finding a decent-paying job than fighting their parents' battles, while immigration to the province – the only source of population growth in Quebec – has discarded any idea of a homogeneous Quebecois culture. Sovereignty might not be dead yet, but it's certainly bed-ridden.