Andrew Keyes

Since I took time off my blogging activities I have a bit of catching up to do. One of the big events I missed was the recent provincial election in Quebec in which Mario Dumont’s ADQ party surprised most pundits with his very strong 2nd place showing. “Most pundits”, but not this one.

The results of the election in Quebec are directly related to the work Stephen Harper has been doing over the past 18 months.

The election results had little to do with the personal popularity of any of the 3 Quebec leaders. In fact, if you look back about a year you’ll see that the separatist PQ under Boisclaire were comfortably heading for a majority win.

Harper’s achievement in Quebec over the last year has been to present Quebec – and the other provinces – with a renewed perspective on federal/provincial relations. Like it or not, the sovereignty option in Quebec no longer offers any significant advantage. Quebecers are now able to put that important debate behind them, and are now able to focus political attention to more mainstream issues, such as the economy and social justice.

In other words, Quebec elections are now more like elections in the rest of Canada. And voter turnout should be expected to fall, as there is much less at stake once the sovereignty issue is removed. Monday’s voter turnout was very close to a historic low. Andrew Coyne discussed this aspect of the election here but I think his assessment is incorrect.

Nik Nanos over at SES has written an interesting post that looks at the next logical progression of this development in Quebec. Let’s just say things look pretty grim for the Liberals.