Quebec

First up, Quebec's recent elections. Held on Monday March 26, the provincial elections were viewed with a fair amount of dread by Quebec's ever-shrinking Anglo population, and with good reason.

The Liberals, who have only held office in Quebec since April 2003 after nearly a decade of the sovereigntist Parti Quebecois (PQ), are at an all-time low in terms of popularity in Quebec for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is, of course, the fallout from the federal sponsorship scandal, but voters were also disenchanted with the Liberals' seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward Quebec politics - after a brief period of being vocal about local issues like One Island One City, once they had been voted in, the Quebec Liberals seemed to all but disappear behind their desks. Oh, and let's not forget the small fact that their leader, Jean Charest, is actually a Tory in disguise.

Add all this to the fact that the federal-level Liberal Party lost to the Conservatives in Canada's general elections in Janaury 2006, and things were looking pretty dire for the Libs in La Belle Province. Except, of course, that a Liberal loss in Quebec would have one serious side-effect that a federal-level loss would not: a win for the PQ.

With the tide of public opinion moving against the Liberals, and the advent of a charismatic young (and it has to be said, hot) new leader for the PQ in the shape of Andre Boisclair, things were looking better for the PQ than they had in years. This newfound confidence had allowed Boisclair to abandon his predecessor's policy of building up the economy and "listening to Quebecers' needs" before aiming for independence at a later date; the new PQ leadership said that as soon as the party was in power, they would immediately hold a new referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Given that they lost the last one by just over a percentage point, it wasn't unthinkable that they could actually win this time around.

Except they didn't. March 26 came and went, and while everbody expected the winner to only have a minority government, nobody predicted the surprise success of the ADQ. The Liberals remain in power with 48 elected National Assembly members, but the ADQ - Quebec's "third party", only in existence since the mid 90s - managed to trump the PQ by winning 41 seats in the National Assembly to become the official opposition. Meanwhile, the PQ limped home with just 36 seats. How the hell did that happen?

Simple, really. It seems that for all the media hysterics (anglo media, no doubt) saying that everything was going to come crashing down and that the sovereignty movement was going to bring about yet more economic uncertainty, most Quebecers still realise that the best deal they are going to get is through a stable, united Canada. Particularly one that now officially recognises Quebec nationhood. Do Quebecers still hate the Liberals? Of course they do, which is why they decided to give them a fright through an ADQ protest vote. The ADQ, by the way, is a sort of right-wing PQ-lite; a nationalist party that originally campaigned on a sovereignty platform but is now content to put that goal on the back-burner indefinitely while it pushes conservative economic policies.

A vote for the Quebec Libs in their present form is often done out of necessity (even my own mother, stalwart anti-pequiste that she is, says she would gladly vote for the PQ were it not for the whole sovereignty issue, as they are the closest thing to a democratic socialist party there is in Quebec). Still, enough people have voted them in to ensure another few years of relative stability stability in Quebec, or as much stability as there can be with such a weak minority government. Come the next provincial election, however, the whole sorry affair will start up again. One thing that could, I think, help to reduce such uncertainty is for the Liberals to get a new leader. Charest has been leader of the Quebec Liberals since 1998, but before that, he headed up the then Progressive Conservatives at the federal level in Ottawa. He was drafted in to lead the Liberals in Quebec simply because there was a dearth of other candidates. Nearly ten years on, it seems that this is still the case. Can there really be no one in the province who is impassioned and experienced enough to take on the job?