BQ agitated as Conservatives drive a wedge into Quebec’s politics

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The Bloc Québécois are leading federal polls in Quebec, but surprising behavior from the party’s leader recently suggest the Conservatives have suddenly got the BQ rattled.

Last Thursday, leader Yves-Francois Blanchet was on Parliament Hill, purportedly to talk about caribou. But in a press conference with several MPs, he went off on a slight tangent about how popular the Bloc is in its home province.

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“Our numbers are extraordinarily good,” Blanchet said.

“We look at (poll aggregator) 338Canada.com and … in Quebec, if you take the averages, we are five, six or seven points ahead of the Liberals who are two, three or four points ahead of the Conservatives who are 10, 12, 13 or 14 points behind the Bloc,” he said.

In Ottawa, Blanchet is known for his flowery rhetoric, but he’s never been known to launch into in-depth comments on the polls in public. He even often warns his MPs against the risk of appearing too confident by relying on favorable polls. Until now.

Something had changed. Even Bloc officials confided to National Post that they were surprised by their leader’s detailed comments.

“I couldn’t believe what I was watching,” said Pierre Paul-Hus, the MP who is the Conservatives’ lieutenant in Quebec. “Honestly, I don’t understand what he was doing there. Is he afraid of something?”

But the Conservatives’ relentless attacks lately on the BQ is something else that hasn’t really happened before in Quebec politics.

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For months, Conservatives have been accusing the Bloc Québécois of being in the Liberals’ pocket on all kinds of issues, like the “government’s radical hard drug experiment” with supervised injection site, the carbon tax, housing and the budgetary appropriation.

While, in English Canada, Conservatives have take to calling their opponents the “NDP-Liberal” coalition, in Quebec they jeer at the “Bloc-Libéral” alliance, hoping to taint the more popular separatist party with the Trudeau government’s bad odour.

And it could upend the typical federal political dynamics in the province.

“There is one thing that has never happened in 30 years, which is that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have attacked the Bloc directly, to attack Bloc MPs on their positions” said Paul-Hus. “Pierre Poilievre is changing that”.

At his press conference on Thursday, Blanchet practically fumed at the accusations from Conservatives that his party wasn’t standing up to federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault. The federal minister recently invoked an emergency decree that will override Quebec’s provincial policies on protecting woodland caribou.

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Both the Conservatives and the Bloc are against the federal decree and in favour of the province’s right to control its own resources. The Tories are calling for an emergency meeting of the House of Commons natural resources committee this summer. The Bloc is taking a different approach, calling on the feds to “trust Quebec” and to work with the province “to find a reasonable and a responsible solution that will last for the long term both for the caribou and for the logging companies”.

But Conservatives MPs on social media have taken advantage of the split, accusing the Bloc of avoiding coming to work on the Hill in summer, being too busy enjoying their vacations, and being “directly complicit in the disastrous consequences that this decree will have on the economy of the regions of Quebec.”

That could well be what led to Blanchet’s 25-minute summer press conference on Parliament Hill, featuring five MPs — including Marilène Gill, who represents Manicouagan, a riding located 870 kilometres from the capital; and Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe and Mario Simard, from the Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean area, more than 650 kilometres from Parliament Hill.

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“I know it’s not nice, but there are damn limits to telling lies,” Blanchet said Thursday about the Conservatives’ accusations.

“They (the Conservatives) bother me on this issue, because not telling the truth bothers me,” he said.

Philippe J. Fournier, who runs 338Canada.com, the poll aggregation website that Blanchet cited Thursday, said he was also surprised at the Bloc leader’s outburst. He noted that politicians always look at the polls, but they don’t usually brag about them in public.

Especially since 338Canada.com has the Bloc Québécois polling at 33-per-cent in the province.

“It’s not a great score if you compare it to past elections because it’s just a third of the Quebec electorate,” Fournier said. “It’s just that since the Liberals are down, and especially down outside Montreal, the vote splits (in an election) would favour the Bloc Québécois.”

What strikes Fournier is how confident the Bloc seems in these circumstances.

He remembers the 2011 federal election, when the party was comfortably in the lead — before being nearly wiped out by an NDP surge, retaining only four seats.

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Quebecers are renowned for their political infidelities. In 2008, the Bloc won the most seats in the province. In 2011, it was the NDP, and in 2015, the Liberals.

“The Quebec voters have a habit of following or creating a wave. You cannot take Quebec voters for granted,” said Fournier.

Recent polling suggests the Bloc is poised to profit from the Liberals’ weakness in the province and gain more seats in the next election, but a few of its MPs are vulnerable to being beaten.

The Conservatives currently hold nine of 78 seats in Quebec and remain third in the polls with around 24 per cent, behind the Liberals with 25 per cent and the Bloc with 33 per cent.

But Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is reportedly eyeing winning as many as 17 Quebec ridings in the next election, a historic first for his party.

Some of those seats currently belong to Liberals in Montreal and Quebec City.

But they’re also aiming to flip a few current Bloc Québécois ridings their way — in the Centre-du-Québec region, Trois-Rivières, Jonquière and Beauport-Limoilou. The hostilities between Blanchet and the Conservatives might only be getting started.

National Post
atrepanier@postmedia.com

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