THE QUÉBEC TURN

ROGER RASHI

The 2 May 2011 Canadian federal election was a watershed event in Québec politics. Canada’s social democratic party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), swept the province, gaining 80 percent of the federal seats and consigning the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois to also-ran status with a mere handful of seats. Prior to 2011, the Bloc, acting in effect as the nationalist Parti Québécois’s federal wing, had garnered a majority of Québec seats in six consecutive federal elections. The unexpected result in the 2011 election both revealed and amplified the crisis in the ranks of the nationalist Bloc, leading many commentators in English Canada to conclude that the Québec National Question, for so many years an insurmountable stumbling block for the NDP, had lost its mobilizing potential. However, the NDP’s long-term success is far from assured. Its victory on 2 May is fragile, the electorate is highly volatile, and the National Question, while less prominent than it once was, is still a significant factor. Furthermore, other left alternatives are gaining influence, especially the social movement–oriented and pro-independence Québec Solidaire.

AN EMERGING LEFT-RIGHT AXIS

The social and ideological foundations for progressive politics are quite strong in Québec. At 40 percent, the province has the highest trade union density of any jurisdiction in North America (Statistics Canada 2009, table 1).¹ Québec’s unions are on the defensive but are still capable of large mobilizations when the need arises, as shown by the April 2010 public sector’s demonstration that brought 75,000 people into the streets of Montreal. Furthermore, the province’s social movements (focused on anti-poverty, housing, women, the environment, and students) are active, vocal, and influential. Public opinion, perhaps more than anywhere else on the continent, is favourable to public and state intervention in the economy. As a result, classical neoliberal policies are unpopular, as attested by the persistently weak vote for the Stephen Harper–led federal Conservative Party. It is significant as well that anti-war sentiment is more widespread in Québec than in any other province. Québecers have, for example, expressed strong opposition to Canada’s involvement in the US-led war effort in Afghanistan.

Québec constitutes perhaps the ultimate paradox for social democracy in North America. Nowhere else on the continent does one find more favourable conditions for the flourishing of a social democratic party, yet no meaningful formation of that type existed in the province until the 2 May 2011 federal election. On that fateful day, the federal New Democratic Party, led by the late Jack Layton, won fifty-nine of Québec’s seventy-five federal seats with a 43 percent share of the popular vote in the province. At the outset of the election campaign, the NDP had only one federal MP in the province — Thomas Mulcair, in the riding of Outremont — and, according to opinion polls, enjoyed the support of about 20 percent of the public. This was, in fact, the highest level of support and representation the NDP had ever attained in Québec. The 2 May result was a thunderbolt that shook up the Québec political scene and propelled the NDP to Official Opposition status in Ottawa, with a caucus dominated by Québec MPS. Overnight, it changed the profile of the NDP. However, the party’s organizational roots in Québec are extremely thin, and it remains to be seen whether this unexpected result will lead to a permanent and solid NDP presence in the province or will turn out to be a flash in the pan.

The main loser on election night was without a doubt the Bloc Québécois (BQ). With polls on the eve of the election campaign giving it a 40 percent share of the vote and a 20 percent lead on the rest of the field, the Bloc was expected to sweep the province, thereby laying the foundation for a Parti Québécois (PQ) victory in the next provincial election. Instead, it sank to 23 percent of the popular vote and held on to a mere four of the forty-nine seats it had won in the 2008 election. The BQ’s resounding defeat shocked the nationalist camp. Within a month of the 2 May debacle, the long-simmering crisis in the PQ broke out into the open as five members of the provincial legislature quit the party, accusing it of having lost both its focus on Québec sovereignty and its social democratic principles. Open dissent with the leadership continued unabated in the parliamentary caucus, and talk was rife of an attempt to unseat Pauline Marois, the much-weakened party leader. Overnight, the PQ, which had been leading in the polls against the scandal-prone and highly unpopular provincial Liberal Party, fell to second place. Even worse, a right-leaning political movement with a vaguely autonomist platform, led by former PQ minister François Legault, was by late fall leading in the polls and attracting support from both former Liberal and PQ voters (Corbeil 2011). At the end of 2011, the PQ was thus mired in a deep crisis, losing support on both its left and right flanks.

For four decades, the Parti Québécois, with its social democratic rhetoric, seemed to have a stranglehold on progressive voters. However, this hold has waned throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century. The party’s adoption of neoliberal policies during its years in government from 1994 to 2003, coupled with continued attempts to lure nationalist conservative voters in an effort to regain power, has repulsed many of its left-leaning supporters. The space to the left of the PQ is now in the process of being filled by Québec Solidaire, a New Left–type party with its roots in the anti-globalization movements of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century. This young party, sporting an anti-capitalist and pro-Québec independence program, is now credited with 14 percent of the vote provincially (CROP Opinion Poll, October 2011).

Many commentators, among them the highly respected sociologist Pierre Drouilly, and political scientist Jean-Harman Guay, have correctly noted that a major realignment of political forces is underway in Québec (Drouilly 2008, Guay 2011). For decades, the political scene was dominated by a federalist-sovereigntist axis that pitted the federal and provincial Liberal parties against the Parti Québécois and the Bloc Québécois. However, the crisis in the nationalist camp has been mirrored by an equally severe crisis in the rival camp. The federal Liberals have been grievously affected by the aftermath of the 2005 sponsorship scandal, while the provincial Liberals are reaching record levels of unpopularity. The federalist and sovereigntist blocs are no longer hegemonic, and new forces are emerging. From this fractured political scene, a left-right divide is emerging in Québec.

This major realignment of political forces in Québec is creating an opening on the left of the political spectrum. But which left will rise to fill this void? Will it be a mainstream, Third Way social democracy, drawing sustenance from the NDP’s success on the federal scene, or a grassroots left coalescing around Québec Solidaire’s social movement–oriented strategy? Currently, these two paths are being pursued on different levels, one on the federal scene and the other on the provincial, but in the present fluid state of political realignments in Québec, some overlap between these two cannot be excluded.

THE NDP’S QUÉBEC SUCCESS: A HISTORIC BREAKTHROUGH?

The massive success of the NDP in the 2011 federal election should not obscure the fact that it rests on an extremely weak organizational basis in Québec. While the fifty-nine federal seats gathered in the province represent close to 60 percent of the NDP caucus in Ottawa, its membership in the province was still a mere 2 percent of the total party membership four months after the election (Olivier 2011). Furthermore, prior to the May 2011 election, only a handful of ridings had local party chapters. In many areas of the province, the NDP was simply absent or, at best, operated through regional committees. In contrast to other areas in Canada, the NDP had no support from organized labour, and none of Québec’s influential social movements endorsed the party. Most of the victorious candidates, with the notable exception of Mulcair and four or five others, were stand-ins, who had little if any roots in the community. In many cases, they did not even campaign locally. In short, in Québec the NDP is a top-heavy party with no solid organizational roots.

The main factor behind the NDP’s surge in Québec was the voters’ strong rejection of the federal Conservative Party. What was new was that this discontent was expressed in massive voting for a party that had been unable to engineer any kind of success in the French-speaking province for fifty years. The popularity of Jack Layton, which owed much to his ability to communicate in French, and a campaign cleverly pitched to “working families” partially explain this result. Another factor is the loss of traction of the traditional nationalist appeal to uphold “Québec rights” above all other social considerations, although it’s important to keep in mind that, according to a June 2011 Léger Marketing poll, close to 40 percent of NDP voters in Québec still support sovereignty. In addition, many have little or no knowledge of the party’s platform or history. In a context of ongoing political realignment and high electoral volatility, a repetition of the 2 May result four or five years from now is far from a foregone conclusion for the NDP.

Not surprisingly, consolidating its breakthrough is presently the NDP’s main objective in Québec. Two strategies are possible. The one championed by Mulcair and supported by a number of Québec caucus members is to keep to the political mainstream and avoid too close a relationship with organized labour or the social movements. The unavowed goal of this strategy is to syphon off federal Liberal organizers and supporters in order to build the party from above. The other possible strategy — put forward by trade unionist Alexandre Boulerice, a CUPE staff rep newly elected in the Montreal riding of Rosemont — is to build the party from below by strengthening the party’s links with labour and the social movements while keeping a strong focus on defending Québec’s national rights, including the right to self-determination.

Needless to say, the party seems to be tilting toward Mulcair’s strategy since it dovetails quite nicely with its own trajectory as a tame social democratic formation. But it must tread carefully since too overt an appeal to former Liberal supporters could easily backfire in Québec. Mulcair’s notoriety is also a double-edged sword. As a former provincial Liberal minister from 2003 to 2006, he brought instant credibility to the NDP, but he is also viewed with suspicion by many left-wing activists. His reputation as a staunch federalist and determined opponent of Québec independence does not sit well with more nationalist voters.

As for Boulerice, an increasingly influential voice in the caucus, his identification with labour and militant resistance to the Harper Conservatives is definitely an asset. His refusal to cave in to public pressure from English-Canadian media and renounce his membership in Québec Solidaire (as interim NDP caucus leader Nycole Turmel was forced to do in August 2011) has won him considerable respect among activists. However, he was forced by the party leadership to backtrack on the Palestinian issue and withdraw his very public support for the “Canadian boat to Gaza” initiative. He has also remained silent on some errors committed by party leaders with regard to matters sensitive to Québecers, one example being the unexplained acceptance of a unilingual Supreme Court judge named to the bench by the Tory government.

At this stage, the balance of forces within the party is far from favourable to a “grassroots left” strategy. At best, this strategy might coexist with a more dominant “social democracy from above” approach. But the fundamental question remains: Will the NDP be able to navigate the treacherous waters ahead in Québec and consolidate the 2 May breakthrough? The shoals are obvious. As a party, the NDP is out of sync with the militancy of Québec’s social movements. It also takes a highly ambiguous stand on the Québec National Question. Even though, at Jack Layton’s urging, the party did recognize Québec’s right to self-determination in 2005, it then proceeded to back away from any move to exercise that right and dropped any mention of the issue in its 2008 and 2011 election platforms. The late Jack Layton was very adept at navigating the treacherous waters of Québec. His background as a social activist and his public support for the right to self-determination gave him considerable leeway in the province. But that might not be the case with his successor Mulcair.

QUÉBEC SOLIDAIRE: A NEW PHENOMENON IN QUÉBEC

In contrast to the NDP’s top-heavy, “social democracy from above” strategy, Québec Solidaire (QS) represents a much more “grassroots left” approach. It is the first political formation with a modicum of electoral success in Québec to arise from outside the political establishment. Its founders have come exclusively from the social movements and left-wing organizations.

The genesis of QS is intimately linked to the rise of the anti-globlalization movement after 2000. The first few years of this decade witnessed major extra-parliamentary mobilizations in Québec. The forerunners of QS, the UFP (Union des forces progressistes) and Option Citoyenne, were founded in 2002 and 2003, respectively, with the explicit purpose of giving this rising social movement a political voice. Thus, in February 2006, when UFP and Option Citoyenne merged into a unified political party with six thousand paying members, QS defined itself in its founding statement as “anti-globalization, feminist, ecological, anti-war, and left-wing” (Québec Solidaire 2006). Its membership, drawn extensively from these mass movements, is a mix of young activists, more mature community and labour activists, and far-left activists acting openly as “recognized collectives” (akin to recognized tendencies) within the party.²

Following the election of its first and only parliamentarian in December 2008, QS has steadily risen in the polls. By October 2011 it was credited with 14 percent support, roughly three times that of 2008. Representing the Montreal area riding of Mercier in the National Assembly, Amir Khadir has won plaudits from many observers and, more importantly, from the public for his performance both in and out of Parliament. As Léger Marketing polls released in December 2010 and in June 2011 confirm, Khadir is a highly popular personality in Québec, who plays a key role in many of the political debates agitating the province.

Some analysts have attempted to cast QS as a Québec variant of the NDP, but that is definitely not the case. The new party has integrated the main demands of the social movements into its platform, along with a strong call for increased public ownership in natural resources, clean energy production, pharmaceuticals, and public transports. At its March 2011 convention, QS moved toward explicit anti-capitalism, calling for the eventual socialization of economic activities based on “national and democratic planning of large-scale nationalized enterprises,” “a greater role for social economy (cooperatives and community-owned firms)” and a “regulated private sector comprised of small and medium firms” (Québec Solidaire 2011, 4–7). On the National Question, QS believes that national and social emancipation must be linked in a joint struggle for a non-capitalist and independent Québec. It has put forth a call for the election of a Québec constituent assembly to discuss and democratically determine the constitution of the future sovereign country.

After granting an inordinate amount of attention to electoral work in its first two years, courtesy of back-to-back Québec general elections in 2007 and 2008, QS is now actively supporting and participating in the rising social and labour battles erupting daily in the province. Thus, in its program and practice, the new party is well to the left of any Western social democratic party, including the meek and mild NDP. As I have argued elsewhere (Rashi 2010), QS can be more properly understood as a New Left formation similar to those that have appeared in several European countries (Germany, France, Portugal, and Denmark) during the past decade.

THE PQ: A NATIONALIST PARTY WITH A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC VENEER

Mired in a deep crisis and facing a historic decline, it is easy to dismiss the Parti Québécois as a spent force. However, a cursory look at its history leads to a more prudent assessment of a party that redefined Québec history in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

The PQ was founded in 1968 by a splinter group from the provincial Liberal Party. Led by René Lévesque, a popular former journalist and past provincial Liberal minister of Natural Resources, it quickly became a mass party and was first elected to power in 1976. Its overriding objective as enshrined in Article One of the party’s program has always been sovereignty for Québec. Its adoption of a social democratic program in its early years had both strategic and tactical motives. It was strategic because the modernizing nationalist elite leading the PQ saw the Québec provincial state as the key to capturing the economy and laying the foundation for a strong entrepreneurial class that could lead Québec to sovereignty. It was tactical because it allowed the party to garner support from organized labour and working-class voters throughout the 1970s, a time of high social mobilization and intense labour struggles in Québec (Fournier 1981).

By the late 1970s, the PQ was established as the main electoral representative of both French-speaking and working-class voters. The budding PQ-labour alliance was further cemented during the 1980 referendum campaign when the PQ’s request for a mandate “to negotiate a new pact of sovereignty-association” with the rest of Canada received only 40 percent support. Despite this alliance, organized labour never had any direct input into the PQ. It holds no voting bloc in the party and has no official representatives in its leading bodies. Conversely, the PQ has never defined itself as a working-class party or as the political voice of labour. The PQ has always insisted that it is first and foremost a coalition of various political trends seeking Québec’s sovereignty. The nature of its relationship to labour can be characterized as “clientelist” rather than “organic,” as is the case with most social democratic parties in the Western world. Even though these parties are clearly reformist and have long ago abandoned any pretense of overthrowing capitalism, they are “organic” in that they have their roots in labour and are structurally linked to the trade unions. This is not the case with the PQ, a multi-class party that has always refused such structural links.

Since 1982 the PQ has repeatedly lurched to the right, straining its “clientelist” relationship with labour to the breaking point. Its first brutal turn to the right came in the aftermath of the lost 1980 referendum on sovereignty. Faced with a growing worldwide recession and swayed by the rising tide of neoliberal policies in the Western world, the PQ struck violently at public sector employees. In a series of legislative moves in 1982 and 1983, the PQ government instituted an immediate 20 percent rollback in wages to be followed with a three-year freeze. The PQ justified this unprecedented move by invoking the need to protect public finances at a time when the province was under attack by a vengeful federal government bent on forcing Québec to its knees with the unilateral repatriation of the Constitution of Canada. Combining patriotic appeals to workers with skillful moves to split private sector unions from their public sector brethren, the PQ government successfully crushed the most militant sectors of the labour movement. This defeat, much like Ronald Reagan’s victory over the air controllers in the US or Margaret Thatcher’s crushing of the miners’ union in the UK, ushered in a long period of retreat for Québec trade unions (Rouillard 2004).

This scenario was repeated once more in the mid-1990s. Re-elected in 1994 and moving rapidly toward convening a second referendum to take advantage of the negative fallout in the wake of the failed Meech Lake Accord, the PQ resorted once again to its tried-and-true tactic: it resurrected its social democratic program and assiduously courted the trade union vote. Lucien Bouchard, then the leader of the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa, called on Québecers to vote for sovereignty as a bulwark against the English-Canadian neoliberalism threatening to engulf the province.

Following a heart-wrenching defeat by a mere 1 percent in the 1995 referendum, Bouchard, installed as head of the PQ and Québec premier by virtue of his leadership of a nearly successful referendum campaign, struck hard at working people. Barely six months into his administration, Bouchard brought down the toughest austerity measures ever seen in Québec. Dubbed “deficit zero,” this ruthless budget-cutting policy resulted in massive cutbacks in health, education, welfare programs, government agencies, and state regulations (Gélinas 2003, 83–91). In an eerie instance of déjà vu, Bouchard justified it all with a massive appeal to Québec national solidarity in the face an aggressive Engish-Canadian backlash following yet another referendum defeat. Learning from previous experience, Bouchard manoeuvred to mitigate the negative fallout by securing the support of trade union leadership with empty promises of tax-relief measures and job-creating programs.

Predictably defeated in 2003, when a sullen electorate and labour turned away, the PQ even lost official opposition status in 2007, although it regained it in December 2008. After dithering over electoral strategy for a couple of years, Pauline Marois, installed as leader in 2007, opted to reach out to conservative nationalist voters who had defected to the populist Action démocratique du Québec. In March 2010, she moved to put the PQ social democratic shibboleths to rest by calling on the party to recognize that “individual Quebecers, not the state, should henceforth be the driving force in Quebec wealth creation” (“PQ Severs Ties to SPQ Libre” 2010). She completed her “modernization” of the party program in the spring of 2011 by proposing to abandon the traditional strategy of calling a referendum on sovereignty during the first mandate of an elected PQ government. She proposed instead a murky strategy of “sovereign governance” that would eventually lead to a referendum when the conditions were ripe. In one fell swoop, she succeeded in further alienating both left-leaning voters and core nationalist members, setting the stage for the present wrenching crisis in the party.

THE CONGENITAL WEAKNESS OF QUÉBEC SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

A significant aspect of the PQ’s multiple right-wing turns over the past two decades is that internal opposition was always muted and of no major consequence. No splits occurred, no divisive programmatic debates ensued, few if any significant resignations took place. The social democrats within the party swallowed the neoliberal policies, rationalized them as having been imposed by tough economic and ideological conditions, appealed for unity against the federalist camp, and held on to their ministerial or administrative posts. This combination of careerist opportunism and crass compromise with right-wing economic policies has deeply marked social democracy in Québec. In a sense, Québec social democrats were Third Way adherents before the term was even coined.

As for the top labour leadership, it kept oscillating between open support and more muted criticism, never openly breaking the ties first established in the late 1970s. Pointing to the PQ’s progressive legislation in government — anti-strike breaking legislation and no-fault auto-insurance in the 1970s, public daycare programs in the 1990s — as if these somehow cancelled out the neoliberal policies and attacks on labour, and continually pleading the “lesser evil” approach, according to which it is better to have some friends in government that none at all, labour leadership swallowed the bitter pills, always hoping for a better tomorrow.

This congenital weakness of Québec social democracy has deep historical roots. It is important to realize that Québec never had a mass-based left-wing party. The Communist Party of Canada did have an influence in trade unions in the 1930s and 1940s; its high-water mark was reached in 1943 and 1945 with the election of Fred Rose, a member of the Communist Party, in the Montreal federal riding of Cartier. But its influence never went much beyond Eastern European, mostly Jewish immigrants in Montreal. Its French-speaking membership was always tiny. Heavy repression by the conservative and church-supported Québec provincial governments of the 1940s and 1950s effectively wiped out the Communist Party. As for the social democratic NDP — or its forerunner, the CCF — they were always seen as English-Canadian-dominated parties, unsympathetic, if not outrightly hostile, to Québec’s national aspirations. A short-lived Parti Socialiste du Québec, led by popular labour leader Michel Chartrand, did see the light in the early 1960s, but it quickly waned, battered by splits between supporters of a reformed federalism and those attracted by the rising tide of modern Québec nationalism unleashed by the Quiet Revolution of the sixties.

The Quiet Revolution refers to the period from 1960 to 1966 when the provincial Liberal Party, having defeated the backward-looking Union Nationale, launched Québec onto a rapid path of modernization. In a few years, the church influence was swept away, public health and education systems were set up, hospital insurance was established, and hydroelectric production was nationalized. Public enterprises sprang up as modern Keynesian state intervention mechanisms were adopted. Trade union rights were enshrined in a new labour code, and union membership exploded as the budding public sector was allowed to unionize. To be sure, this grand reform was brought about by a modern French-speaking Québec bourgeoisie, technocratic and highly educated, in alliance with big American and English-Canadian capital (Brunelle 1978, chap. 2). But it ushered in a long wave of rising social movements as a new radical Québec nationalism, a feisty student movement, and increasingly assertive trade unions took centre stage. Merging with the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and 1970s, this deceptively named Quiet Revolution brought about a rapid radicalization of Québec political life, as young radicals formed socialist and revolutionary groups, engaged in massive demonstrations, and challenged the system.

Through most of the 1960s, Québec social democrats were scattered. Some were members of the Liberal Party, others gathered in and around the rising nationalist groups, and many were in the trade unions or in academia. The birth of the PQ in 1968, with the charismatic René Lévesque at its head, was a signal call to social democrats. They flocked to the new party, enticed by its promise of rapid success, and helped give it its intellectual and moral authority.

Social democracy meant many things in the Québec of that period. For some, it meant completing the Quiet Revolution by giving Québec a state with full powers that would be capable of sustaining a sovereign nation. For others, it meant reforming capitalism along the lines of European social democracy. For a few, it meant a step on the road to an independent Québec that would then be free to turn toward socialism. The PQ leadership, firmly in the hands of a technocratic bourgeoisie represented by Lévesque and the former high-state functionaries Jacques Parizeau and Claude Morin, was happy to make use of the ambiguities. They rallied as many conventional or right-wing nationalists as they could and kept their left wing on a tight leash. The party was careful to shun the terrorist FLQ in 1970, to steer clear of radical labour struggles, to tone down its social democracy to a level acceptable to corporate interests, much like the NDP or Scandinavian parties, and to keep at bay all those who were too critical of US policies and multinationals. It was in this political environment, replete with compromises and unprincipled horse-trading, that Québec social democracy, itself largely a middle-class phenomenon, came of age. From the very start, it was a subservient trend, careerist and spineless.

BUILDING A LEFT-WING ALTERNATIVE

There is a complex interplay between federal and provincial voting patterns in Québec, but, in the final analysis, it is the provincial level that counts the most. Québec voters traditionally look to their own “national” government first and foremost, as the consistently higher election turnout for provincial ballots clearly demonstrates. In that sense, the lack of a provincial wing since 1994 prevents the NDP from further consolidating its Québec surge. However, having a provincial wing has always confronted the NDP with the daunting problem of its historical stand on the Québec National Question.

From the party’s founding in 1961, it had difficulty in dealing with Québec social democrats’ demands for a new constitutional deal based on the concept of “two associated states.” In 1963, the NDP’s French-speaking members split and, under the leadership of labour leader Michel Chartrand, formed an autonomous Parti Socialiste du Québec, which disappeared in the late sixties, its membership attracted to the newly formed Parti Québécois advocating sovereignty for the province. In 1971, another union leader, Raymond Laliberté, tried to revive the NDP but quit when the party failed to support Québec’s right to self-determination. In 1981, the NDP party leadership endorsed unilateral patriation of the constitution without Québec consent and followed it up with support for the Clarity Act in 2000, which, among other provisions, made a successful referendum vote on sovereignty contingent upon federal parliamentary agreement. Although this blatant disregard for the right to self-determination was partially reversed by Jack Layton with the Sherbrooke Declaration of 2005, this latter document remains strongly committed to federalism, albeit renewed as “asymmetrical federalism” in an attempt to accommodate some of Québec’s demands.

Jumping into the Québec provincial arena, as Mulcair seems to be suggesting, would be a highly risky move that could hinder, rather than assist, the NDP’s surge at the federal level. It may also provoke splits in the Québec caucus and prove divisive in the party’s small Québec membership. It is unlikely that the NDP leadership would endorse this departure from Layton’s carefully laid out strategy of focusing on Québec’s federal rather than provincial vote.

Another social democratic option could arise from a revived Parti Québécois under a new leadership with more credible “left-wing” credentials. The defeated Bloc Québécois leader, Gilles Duceppe, a former trade unionist and 1970s radical, is rumoured to be waiting in the wings, but his capacity to rebuild the fractious and disheartened PQ is questionable. His attempt to grab the leadership of the PQ in 2007 failed because the party machine balked at supporting a relative outsider, as well as at his reputedly iron-fisted leadership style. His popularity, although still high, was diminished by the catastrophic showing of the Bloc in the last federal ballot and by Duceppe’s own shocking defeat in the riding of Laurier-Ste-Marie, which he had held uninterruptedly for twenty years. His appeal to progressive PQ supporters is substantial, but can he credibly appeal to younger movement activists after having personified for so many years the subservience of Québec social democrats to the PQ’s brand of nationalism? In the meantime, other leadership hopefuls are manoeuvring inside and outside the PQ caucus, and a divisive leadership race, rather than reviving the party, could seal its fate. The key question remains: Can the PQ credibly renew its message after holding power for a combined eighteen years out of the last thirty-five and yet failing to deliver on either the social or the national front?

In short, Québec social democracy has been unable to deal adequately with the Québec National Question. In its nationalist garb, it submitted to the PQ for much of the past half-century and lost its social soul in the process. In its federalist garb, it was marginalized for much of this period, until the last federal election, when it successfully capitalized on voters’ discontent.

This historical failure of social democracy, coupled with the realignment of political forces now underway in Québec, has opened a space, probably unique in North America, for a bona fide Left to assert itself. This new Left, in tune with the social movements that have allowed Québec to resist conservative and neoliberal policies to a degree not seen elsewhere in the continent, is attempting to forge a mass alternative capable of influencing the political scene. The future success of Québec Solidaire depends on its ability to deepen its program of a post-capitalist, green, and independent society while simultaneously building larger alliances with social and political forces seeking to oppose the right. That is a difficult challenge for a young party to tackle since it requires differentiating long-term strategic goals from short-term tactical moves yet striving to link them in a coherent political course of action in which tactics both serve and reflect the strategy. The worldwide economic crisis is spurring the party’s critique of financial capital and failed Third Way social democracy. Immediate events are stimulating debates on tactical and electoral alliances as high-profile former PQ parliamentarians and some standing PQ members of the National Assembly are suggesting building a sovereigntist and progressive coalition to oppose the right. The present Parti Québécois leadership, however, is adamant in its refusal of any coalition or electoral pacts. Meanwhile, Québec Solidaire has taken a step, with its last convention, toward clarifying its long-term program. With a Québec provincial election looming sometime in the next two years, the tricky question of tactics is on the table.