Bloc Surge Portends Rough Ride for Canada

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner
 

Like those proverbial creatures in horror films who never die, the Bloc Québécois, with its 32 seats following the federal election, is alive and well – yet again.

They were written off as dead in the last two elections, losing most of their seats to the New Democrats. The Bloc won only four seats in 2011 and 10 in 2015.

The tables were turned this time – the NDP went from 14 seats to two.

Disappointed Conservatives, who won 10, again failed to make gains in the province.

The result is stark: federal Liberals were left with 34 seats, while the nationalist blocquistes dominate Quebec’s 78 ridings.

It was also a contest between an ethnically diverse major city, Montreal, dominated by Justin Trudeau’s federalists, and a largely French-Canadian hinterland.

Nations don’t die, even when conquered by others. Ask, say, Poles or Serbs.

 “I find we are very much alive,” Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet remarked in reference to predictions the Bloc was dying. “We are coming back from far, and we will go still further.”

Nationalism is a critical concept that distinguishes how a community, group, or nation define themselves, their sense of belonging and allegiance, and distinguish themselves from others. 

The Bloc won big in the wake of last year’s victory by a nationalist party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, in the provincial election.

That government’s adoption of Bill 21, which enfored "state secularism" on government employees, reignited the nationalism versus multiculturalism debate. That evolved into the theme of defending Quebec’s interests.

It calls for teachers, police officers, and judges to be free of all religious symbols when on the job, and for those who provide or require formal identification to receive provincial government services to do so with their faces uncovered.

In the rest of Canada, which is now ideologically wedded to a civic liberal form of identity, one that shuns any forms of ethnic or religious collectivity, Quebec’s law was, not surprisingly, seen as a form of bigotry and racism (though religious symbols by themselves have little to do with “race.”) 

But for a national minority living in a compact “homeland,” one that has since 1759 seen itself as battling to keep alive its separate identity, it was a way of fending off its perennial fear – that it would eventually lose its identity and become a multicultural stew of people from anywhere and everywhere, as has become the case in the rest of Canada, which since the 1960s has jettisoned its British past.

Bill 21 is wildly popular in Quebec and francophones in that province are aware that no other federal party supports it. The rest is history. In effect, it was the ballot question.

The election provided other evidence of stark divisions in the country. The Prairie provinces voted overwhelmingly for the losing Conservatives. For Albertans, in particular, whose fossil-fuel economy is now under siege by the climate change activists, it was a disaster.

Calgary’s downtown towers are one-third empty. A minority Liberal government propped up by the NDP and Greens will never build another pipeline, nor will landlocked Alberta find much support from British Columbians, and certainly not from Quebecers, who are more concerned with environmental pollution than jobs in the oil patch.

A rough ride ahead, Canada.