National Affairs: Bernier still looking for a vein to tap into

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on November 17, 2018.

As he travels west in search of support for his breakaway conservative party, Maxime Bernier has taken to introducing himself as “the Albertan from Quebec.”

Albertans will have to decide from themselves whether a leader who reflects their values would, among other things, have Canada turn its back on the global fight against climate change and decline to share the country’s first-world wealth with the planet’s neediest people.

Or whether they believe, like the founder of the People’s Party of Canada, that governments should leave industries — from auto to aerospace to pipelines — to sink or swim on their own, even in the face of job-killing, taxpayer-funded foreign competition.

Or whether they too fear that so-called barbarians are at Canada’s immigration gates, ready to flood the country at Justin Trudeau’s invitation and with the help of a complicit federal Conservative party.

But there is a big grain of truth in Bernier’s depiction of himself as it pertains to his relationship with his home province.

In Quebec, the Beauce MP has long been a square peg in a round hole. His decision to turn his back on the Conservatives to set up a party in his own image has only reinforced his status as a political oddity.

A Mainstreet poll published Wednesday put Bernier’s People’s Party in sixth place in Quebec —behind the Greens. And yet Bernier has probably enjoyed more media attention in the province in three months than Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has in a decade.

Loyalty to the Conservative brand or to the party’s current leader is not the issue. Quebec mostly gave Stephen Harper the cold shoulder for the duration of his tenure. Under Andrew Scheer, the attitude toward the party has largely morphed into benign indifference.

On that score, claims that Bernier’s party will split the conservative vote may be exaggerated. Even if one added up his nascent party’s score with that of the Conservatives in Quebec, the latter would still lag 15 to 20 points behind the leading Liberals. Trudeau, not Bernier, is Scheer’s problem, and not just in Quebec.

Nor is fear of the political unknown — or, for that matter, of right-of-centre ideas — holding Bernier’s party back in his home province.

Over the past decades, Quebec has been an incubator of new parties.

The Bloc Québécois dominated the province’s federal politics for two decades, securing the second-largest number of seats in the House of Commons in its first election campaign.

Seven years after its founding convention, the right-leaning Coalition Avenir Québec is leading a majority government.

If there is one place in Canada where voters have been open to supporting leaders who traded their initial political vehicle for another, or for that matter who sported conservative roots, it is Quebec.

Former Parti Québécois premier Lucien Bouchard started off in politics as a federal Tory, as did former Liberal premier Jean Charest. Quebec’s current premier, Franois Legault, first ran under the PQ banner.

These three, hailing as they do from three different sections of Quebec politics, have more in common with each other than with Bernier.

Where they sought consensus, Bernier does the opposite.

It is not just on supply management in the agricultural industry that Bernier is swimming against the Quebec tide. His call to remove Radio-Canada from its central place in the province’s cultural universe, and his contention that Canada has no place in the international coalition to fight climate change, to name just two, isolate him from the mainstream.

Bernier obviously revels in his self-appointed role as Quebec’s contrarian-in-chief, and glorifies in it outside the province. But for all his pains, he has yet to succeed in stirring up a hornets’ nest. To achieve that, one has to be taken seriously by more than a marginal number of voters.

Bouchard created the Bloc Québécois at a time when many Quebecers were looking for a receptacle for their collective disillusion over the turn of the constitutional debate.

Legault’s CAQ offered federalists and sovereignists an opportunity to leave their weapons at the door after almost two unproductive decades on the post-referendum front, and to work with each other on terms other than the issue of Quebec’s constitutional future.

The Reform Party was born at a time when western alienation was begging for an outlet.

By comparison, in Quebec as elsewhere in Canada, Bernier has yet to find a large vein to tap into. That is not for lack of running around looking for something to prick.

The space at the margins of Canadian politics does not automatically add up to a vacuum begging to be filled.

Chantal Hébert writes on national affairs for Torstar Syndication Services.

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