The PLQ took nearly 46 percent of the vote and 76 seats in the National Assembly, the Parti Quebecois just over 32 percent and 45 seats, and Democratic Action of Quebec (ADQ) 18 percent and 4 seats. Traditionally, the PLQ has been Canada’s rulers’ party in Quebec against the PQ, a bourgeois party that advocates Quebec sovereignty.

While in power, the PQ organized two referendums on the issue of sovereignty, in 1980 and 1995, losing the latter by barely more than 1 percent—an outcome that sent tremors across the ruling class of Canada.

Quebec is the second largest of Canada’s 10 provinces, with a population of 7.4 million. Eighty percent speak French and face institutionalized oppression and discrimination on the basis of their language. The Quebecois have led sustained and at times massive struggles against this oppression and for their national rights.  
 
The wearing of PQ’s power
The election of the PLQ “is very good for Canada,” said Jean Chrétien, Canada’s prime minister, the night of the election, “because the people across the world will see that Canada’s stability is here to stay.” Ernest Eves, Ontario’s Premier, claimed that the election results show that sovereignty is no longer an important issue in Quebec. “Landslide victory by Liberal Party in Quebec’s provincial elections is major setback for separatists,” the New York Times stated even more bluntly April 16.

However, this may be more a wish than a reality.

Despite its victory, there was no shift toward the federalist PLQ in the election. In fact, the Liberals lost a total of 17,000 votes compared to the last provincial election in 1998. The big difference is that a significant proportion of the traditional French-speaking PQ electors either stayed away from the ballot box the day of the election or voted for the ADQ.

On one hand, the abstention rate rose by 8 points, from 22 percent in 1998 to 30 percent this year, the highest in a Quebec provincial election since 1927. On the other, the ADQ gained 216,000 votes, an increase of nearly 7 percent among those who voted. The combined result was a loss of close to half a million votes for the PQ. This ensured the PLQ victory.

The PQ and the PLQ have dominated politics in Quebec for the last three decades through what in fact has been an uneasy two-party system—uneasy because of the PQ program for Quebec sovereignty, which has led to numerous conflicts and skirmishes with the federal government. Both parties have taken turns in office—the PLQ in 1970-76 and 1985-94, and the PQ in 1976-85 and 1994-2003.

While the PQ was formed in 1968 by a section of the Liberals who split from the PLQ on the very question of Quebec sovereignty, over time the two parties have had rather similar, liberal programs on economic and social issues. After two mandates, there had been a noticeable wearing of power in the PQ government.

Despite its prosovereignty rhetoric, the government had not led any significant battle to defend the national rights of the Quebecois since the 1995 referendum, leading to cynicism and demobilization within the party’s ranks.

While for decades a significant proportion of Quebecois have supported Quebec independence as the way forward against their national oppression, the PQ never campaigned for independence. Its call for sovereignty is usually synonymous with demanding more power for the Quebec government in the framework of a redefined federation with the rest of Canada.

During its two mandates, the PQ government also carried out cutbacks in social services won in the big nationalist and working-class struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, thus increasing its unpopularity.

The Liberals took advantage of the weakened support for the PQ, campaigning on the need for a change in Quebec and on the theme of “the priority is healthcare.” The PLQ demagogically promised not to freeze the budgets of the ministries of health and education, while at the same time committing itself, with much less fanfare, to freeze the budgets of all other ministries.  
 
Rise of right-wing ADQ
At the same time, the rise of the Democratic Action of Quebec represents a rupture with the bipartisan framework of the past several decades here. Although it is the product of a 1992 split led by a “moderate” nationalist section of the Liberal party, the ADQ has since then systematically evolved to the right.

While refusing to define the party as federalist, ADQ leader Mario Dumont repeated many times during the election campaign that, “sovereignty is outmoded.” The ADQ promised a substantial reduction in taxes, the privatization of part of the health-care system, and the issuing of vouchers to parent s wishing to send their children to private schools. It also attacked the “excessive power” of the unions.

The growing percentage of the vote won by the ADQ in the last two elections and the support it has begun to receive in the past year among a layer of capitalists and middle-class Quebecois—such as lawyers, notaries, shopkeepers and small businessmen—has made this formation the first serious attempt since the beginning of the 1970s to consolidate a right-wing political party in Quebec with substantial support among the French-speaking population.

The three main union federations here campaigned among their members against the ADQ and the “rise of the right.”

In this framework, the leadership of the Quebec Federation of Labor (FTQ), the largest of the three, did not openly support the PQ as it has in past elections, offering it instead only implicit support by calling for a vote for “the party closest to the workers.”

As for the leadership of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), it switched from its traditional policy of implicit support for the PQ to a call for a “strategic vote” in the April 14 elections, i.e. to vote for whichever candidate of the PQ or the PLQ was best placed in each electoral district to defeat the candidate of Democratic Action. This is the first time since the consolidation of the Parti Quebecois at the beginning of the 1970s that the officialdom of one of the main union federations in Quebec has called for a vote for Liberal candidates.

Another grouping in the elections called the Union of Progressive Forces (UFP) was formed after a regroupment last year of three organizations of the petty-bourgeois left in Quebec. The UFP put forward a program of reforming capitalism to get rid of its abuses and received about one percent of the vote. Refusing to call itself “socialist,” the UFP is a heterogeneous formation. It includes former PQ supporters, forces and individuals who support Quebec independence such as the Regroupment For A Political Alternative and the Party of Socialist Democracy, and those who oppose independence such as the Communist Party of Quebec and the International Socialists.

One fact that best illustrates how uncertain federalist forces are regarding the “death” of pro-independence sentiment in Quebec was their noticeable silence during the Quebec election campaign. No federal Liberal Party minister or prominent federal or provincial politician came to campaign in Quebec or made any public statement in support of Jean Charest.

This is in striking contrast to the referendum of 1995 and the election of 1998. On those occasions, the arrogant interventions, threats, and blackmail of Jean Chrétien and several ministers and federalist politicians from English Canada aroused a strong reaction of national pride on the part of the French-speaking population, almost leading to the victory of the “yes” side in 1995 and certainly causing the defeat of Charest in 1998.

The election campaign was punctuated this year by several demonstrations opposing the U.S.-British assault on Iraq. These marches were much larger in Quebec than the rest of Canada. For example, according to estimates by organizers and the police, the March 15 peace demonstration attracted 150,000-200,000 people in Montreal, compared to tens of thousands in Toronto.

Several politicians and commentators saw this as the reason for the refusal of the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien in Ottawa to openly back the attack by Washington and London on the pretext “that it was not officially approved by the UN.”

According to the Montreal daily La Presse, for example, Conservative Party leader Joseph Clark “accused Mr. Chrétien of having refused to join the war for fear of upsetting the Quebecois.”

There are two things to point out regarding these assertions.

First, throughout the war the Canadian government maintained hundreds of soldiers and sailors in the Middle East in various support roles for the imperialist aggression. Secondly, the opposition of the Quebecois has never prevented Canada’s rulers from going to war or resorting to their army when needed, including against the Quebecois themselves.

During World War I, Ottawa did not hesitate to use its army against a Quebec City march opposing conscription, resulting in five deaths and numerous injuries. In 1940, Canadian authorities imprisoned the mayor of Montreal, a leader of a very broad movement of popular opposition in Quebec to compulsory military service.

And in 1970, in an effort to break a rising wave of converging working-class and national struggles which were sweeping the province, Ottawa declared the War Measures Act, occupying Montreal militarily, carrying out 2,000 raids and arresting 500 union, nationalist and socialist activists.

While in fact participating in Washington’s war against Iraq, Ottawa did not officially support it, primarily in order to defend its traditional role as “an international peace-keeping force,” an image it has sought to maintain under cover of the UN for almost half a century.

As leaders of an imperialist power of secondary rank, Canadian capitalists have worked very hard to develop this particular niche in world politics—a niche that is today being called into question by the profound interimperialist tensions that have shaken the United Nations as an effective instrument for imperialism and more and more mark world politics.

As in the rest of the world, the demonstrations in Quebec against the war on Iraq had an essentially bourgeois, pacifist character. Politically, they were dominated by forces linked to the PQ and the Bloc Quebecois—a party that exist only in Quebec, associated with the PQ that presents itself as a defender of Quebec sovereignty in the Canadian parliament in Ottawa.

As in the rest of the imperialist world, the pacifist demonstrations in Quebec were broadly composed of middle-class forces. Because of the numerous and varied links—cultural, commercial and other—that this social layer has developed since the beginning of the 1960s with France, the self-interested campaign of French imperialism against Washington’s war found a much more direct echo in Quebec than in English Canada or the United States. The illusion of Paris as the “peace party,” therefore, received a more favorable hearing in Quebec.

At the same time, protesters poured into the streets with thousands of Quebecois, not French or Canadian, flags. Moving among the crowd, Militant reporters noted a widespread identification with the history of mistrust of Ottawa and its wars, and the struggle of the Quebecois against such imperialist adventures.

The placards calling for Quebec independence displayed at literature tables of the Communist League and the Young Socialists aroused numerous positive reactions, especially among youth.  
 
‘A new Quebec model’
Since its victory on April 14, the Liberal government of Jean Charest has made clear that its priority is “to review the organization of the Quebec state in its entirety, from top to bottom,” as the new provincial head put it during the presentation of his new cabinet on April 29.

“This will be the first re-engineering of the government of Quebec since the Quiet Revolution,” he added, in announcing the nomination of several ministers specifically mandated to review all social programs.

The “Quiet Revolution” is the name used in Quebec to refer to the period of social change and modernization of the province that characterized the beginning of the 1960s here. It is associated in the minds of many working people with a number of social gains won as a result of struggles against national oppression at that time, mainly in the areas of health care and education.

This shift in priorities of the new government from its pre-election promises came along with the “discovery” after the election of a “hidden deficit” of $4.3 billion in the budget presented in March by the PQ regime. There is no question, said the new minister of the Treasury Council, Monique Jérome-Forget, of “having one deficit after another” and “of spending money which we do not have.” Since its election, the Liberal government’s emphasis on the development of a “new Quebec model” represents a return to the course of attacking social services and trimming down the state apparatus first put forward by Jean Charest in his 1998 campaign. At that time the PLQ had rapidly backtracked in face of the opposition this course aroused.

It remains to be seen at what speed and on what fronts this assault will advance. One of the first key tests could be the next negotiations with the employees of the provincial state—government employees, teachers, nurses and hospital workers—whose contract expires June 30. The unions have already announced their intention to focus on reducing the general wage disparity between the jobs mainly held by women compared to those performed by men.  
 
 
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