Bold choice for new BQ leader

[james_davis_nicoll]

Yields immediate results.

Comments

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Just out of curiosity, what do the demographics of the BQ look like? Are they in danger of turning into a party of old men shouting at clouds?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Quebec's demographics aren't great.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Hard to say. The separatist demographic is definitely becoming old men shouting at clouds. But up until the last election with the big NDP surge, the BQ was a coalition of separatists, Quebec-first people (who don't necessarily want to separate, just have an adversarial relationship with the federal government and want their representative to be emphatically pushing for recognition of Quebec's special status and interests), and socialists who hitched their wagon to the BQ because they had more federal power than the NDP.

So the question is how much of the shift in support in Quebec to the NDP is permanent, and how much will shift back to the BQ in upcoming elections.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Ah, that makes sense. And this guy got voted in as party leader by appealing to the separatists, and enough non-separatists had left for him to get a majority.

[redbird]

Yes. If I'd been voting in a Quebec provincial election years ago, the Bloc might have looked like a better choice than Charest's Liberals. (I'm not even a Canadian citizen, so that's highly hypothetical.)

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Actually the Bloc Quebecois is a federal party only; Charest led the provincial Liberal party (after being in a different party at the federal level). You might be thinking of the Parti Quebecois, which is the provincial sovereigntist party. (And also has a lot of not-actual-sovereigntists voting for them just because they're not the Liberals.)

[redbird]

Thanks; somehow I keep getting the names Bloc and Parti Quebecois confused. And yes, that Charest was a Tory at the federal level is part of why I was skeptical of the provincial Liberal party he was leading.

[dronon.livejournal.com]

There are definitely separatist young adults in Quebec, but I don't know how sizable they are.

Back around 2008 or so, the National Film Board gave a couple of young documentary-makers a camera and a small budget. One of them, a Franco-Ontarian, made the ballsy move of going to the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City during the annual St. Jean Baptiste celebrations. That's where a whole bunch of the Quebec youth separatists show up, and she basically asked them, "So if Quebec separates, what about us French-Canadians outside Quebec?" Most of them disregarded or downplayed the question; I think there was some cognitive dissonance at work. The NFB/ONF released it under the title "So, where do we fit in?" or "Pis nous autres dans tout ça?"

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Having grown up amongst Acadians, I know a common gripe, during the 70s and 80s, was that the only time Québec séperatistes gave a shit about francophones outside the province was when there was some sort of issue that they could point to and say "See! Discrimination! But enough about them, let's talk about us." If the problem didn't look like it could be exploited, the non-Québecois francophones might as well have been fictional characters.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I would have thought that losing any support from the likes of Bouchard and Duceppe is pretty much a recipe for disaster, but maybe this is the party "renewing itself"...