Alf Young: Are we in for different kind of split?

The French Canadian battle for sovereignty opens up some intriguing possibilities if mirrored in Scotland, writes Alf Young

IN QUEBEC, the heart of francophone Canada, they are talking about identity, or rather identité, again. On Tuesday, for the first time in nearly a decade, the Parti Québécois regained control of the provincial government. Its leader, Pauline Marois, now intends confronting Canada’s right-wing prime minister, Stephen Harper, over her party’s constitutional demands.

“We won’t be satisfied with just getting more powers,” she told Toronto’s Globe and Mail during the election campaign. “What we want is Quebec sovereignty. And until we achieve it following a referendum, what we want is to get more powers on what makes us different as a people.” Sound familiar?

However, thanks to a late surge by the three-term incumbent Liberal Party, what had looked like a decisive PQ victory turned out to be a much more close-run thing. Marois’s PQ took 54 seats on a vote share of 31.9 per cent. The Liberals, while losing their leader, the departing premier, Jean Charest, still managed 50 seats on 31.2 per cent of the vote. And from nowhere a new francophone grouping, Coalition Avenir Québec, attracted an astonishing 27.1 per cent of the vote, winning 19 seats.

The CAQ, with both federalists and Quebec nationalists in its ranks, offers a right-of-centre economic prospectus. Crucially, given the economic uncertainty that currently engulfs even the G8’s most successful economy, it wants to park the issue of Quebec sovereignty for at least the next decade and deal instead with issues like Quebec’s sluggish growth and its burgeoning public debt, 51 per cent of GDP and the biggest by far in Canada.

“Everyone will lose if there’s (another) referendum,” argues the CAQ’s millionaire leader, Francois Legault. After a successful career in aviation, Legault was elected on the PQ ticket back in 1998 and served as a minister and then an opposition spokesman for the party right through until 2009. Less than a year ago he and another entrepreneur formed the CAQ.

Since the PQ’s latest victory celebration, marred by a fatal shooting, some of the rhetoric has been toned down. Back in February, Ms Marois, a feisty PQ veteran and mother-of-four, was promising that, if she won power, and 15 per cent of voting-age Quebecers (some 850,000) signed a petition in favour of another independence referendum, any government she led would feel duty bound to deliver it.

But even before Tuesday’s vote she was flip-flopping. A PQ government would allow citizens to try and initiate a referendum. But the Quebec National Assembly would have a veto over whether that vote could proceed, she suggested. After Tuesday’s results, the PQ does not have the votes in that Assembly to stop such a veto being passed.

The woman they call the concrete lady has also been forced to trim on some language policies. One, designed to prevent anyone who cannot speak French seeking public office, she now wants to restrict to new immigrants. But she still plans to toughen Bill 101, to ensure that in companies with as few as ten employees, work will be conducted in French. Current legislation only applies to companies with 50 employees or more.

“French is the workplace language of Quebec,” insists its new premier. On such cultural issues Marois is taking a much harder line than some in her own party find comfortable. But she sees it as one way of building a new head of steam behind the case for Quebec sovereignty.

The previous two referendums on independence, in 1980 and 1995, were lost, the first decisively, the second narrowly. Even with this week’s PQ victory, the appetite for voting yes at a third time of asking simply isn’t there. A poll taken during this campaign put support for an independent Quebec at just 28 per cent.

Even the core nationalist vote can prove fickle. In last year’s Canada-wide general election, the federal equivalent of the PQ in Quebec, the Bloc Québécois was virtually wiped out by a rampant, pan-Canada, left-of-centre New Democratic Party, led by Quebec-born Jack Layton. Before that May 2011 vote, the BQ held 47 seats in Ottawa. Afterwards it had just four. For the first time in its history, the NDP became the official opposition in Ottawa.

Before that poll the NDP held just one seat in Quebec. Afterwards it boasted 58, including the scalps of three of prime minister Harper’s former cabinet ministers. The NDP, which lost the charismatic Layton to cancer just months after that victory, didn’t even contest this week’s provincial contest in Quebec. But its new leader, Thomas Mulcair, himself a Quebec MP, is considering taking his party into provincial politics.

Does Quebec and how its people have wrestled with their sovereignty question have any lessons for Scotland, now little more than two years from our own referendum day? Probably fewer than we think, I venture, despite our deep historic links. I watched, discussed and read about the unfolding Quebec provincial election from Nova Scotia, further down the great St Lawrence seaway, where we were visiting my cousin and his family, one of whose members is from French-speaking Quebec.

Canada is one of the least densely populated countries on earth. Quebec, for instance, is around the size of western Europe, but has a population of just eight million. Canada is an established confederation, home to First Nation and Inuit people as well as French, English and Gaelic speaking descendants of early waves of European migrants and colonisers. It has extensive natural resources, not least the vast reserves of hydrocarbons in the oil sands of booming Alberta.

But Canada’s politics is much more fluid and volatile than ours. Party fortunes wax and wane with astonishing speed. New groupings, like the CAQ in Quebec can come from nowhere and win significant blocs of votes in no time at all. Following the latest provincial election in Alberta this spring, for instance, the official opposition is now Wildrose, a party that has only existed in its current form for four years.

Economically well to the right, but socially libertarian, it was leading the entrenched Progressive Conservative Party for the entire campaign, only to fall short at the final hurdle. But Wildrose still took 34.3 per cent of the vote against the PC’s 43.9 per cent. However, in terms of seats, it trailed 19 to 61.

As Alberta grows steadily richer by exploiting its oil sands, resentment about subsidising the rest of Canada grows and grows. In the past decade there was a short lived Independence Party of Aberta and even, I kid you not, a Separation Party of Alberta. You’ll find internet sites called FreeAlberta and RepublicofAlberta.

It all begins to trigger an intriguing thought. If Scotland’s referendum in 2014 fails to deliver the result its promoters seek, might Scottish politics finally grow weary of our established political parties, whether unionist or nationalist, and start generating some NDPs, CAQs and even Wildroses of our own?