Election Notebook

>> Week 1 features polls, hijabs, foreign coverage and debate about the debates

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Back on the trail! On the road again! Oh boy! Here we go! Yes, it’s election time, and pundits are predicting a tight three-way race between the Charest Liberals, Boisclair’s Parti Québécois (PQ) and Mario Dumont’s Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ). The Liberals, however, have an early lead in the polls (37 per cent to the PQ’s 28 and the ADQ’s 24). Boisclair’s recent decision to play down the sovereignty card is bound to alienate the hardcore nationalists (although he is promising “public consultation” on Quebec sovereignty, whatever that means), but it may appeal to red-wine-sipping soft nationalists who don’t want to see the value of their east-Plateau condos plummet. The ADQ, meanwhile, is busy catering to the hick (whoops! We mean rural) vote and getting all ornery over that reasonable accommodation stuff. So hang on to your hats, voters! Election Notebook’ll be your weekly guide to all the grooviness going down over the next month.

And now, a word from abroad. The Economist, the stuffy but incisive British news weekly, has a full page on the provincial election, headlined “The strange disarray of Quebec separatism.” Datelined Montreal, the lead graf draws an entirely à propos parallel between provincial politics and our “notoriously unforgiving” relationship with “our ice-hockey teams”: “A mediocre streak, such as the Montreal Canadiens have suffered recently [EN note: over at last! Maybe?], is greeted by calls for players to be traded or the management sacked. [Quebecers] are far more indulgent of their provincial government. They tend to get a second term no matter how the first one went.” Quite. The article argues that the PQ’s identity crisis—sovereigntists on one side, pragmatic centrists on another—and its leader, the openly gay Boisclair, whose “thin-skinned haughtiness and evasiveness” and history of cocaine use may be two important strikes against it come March 26. Federal largesse, including the recent $350-million package Prime Minister Stephen Harper handed to Quebec recently for green measures, with possibly more to come when the feds present their budget later this month, and the cozy personal relationship between Harper and Charest position the Liberal leader to promise he’ll milk Ottawa for every penny. Which he’ll likely get, as Harper has to kiss serious franco butt if he wants a majority next federal election.

It looks like Jean Charest is jumping into the reasonable accommodation fray too. On Monday, the premier said he supported a ref’s call to bar 11-year-old Asmahan Mansour from playing soccer while wearing a hijab, a Muslim headscarf. Safety concerns, don’t you know—although nowhere else in Canada has the hijab presented a problem in any way whatsoever. Mansour’s team, the Nepean Hotspurs Select, forfeited Sunday’s game at a tournament in Laval, and two other Nepean teams pulled out as well. Dumont supported the ban, also citing safety concerns, but Joe Guest, the head of officiating at the Canadian Soccer Association with 28 years in the soccer world, told The Gazette he’s never encountered this problem anywhere, including in his native, soccer-mad, multi-culti Britain. Muslim leaders in Montreal, not surprisingly, were unimpressed, and pointed out that sports hijabs are fastened with Velcro and come off easily.

Tuesday’s La Presse offered an insightful article on the machinations behind the upcoming televised leaders’ debate. According to reporter Denis Lessard, the wrangling involved the date (scheduled for Monday, March 12, which the broadcasters—RadCan, TVA and Télé-Québec—prefer, since a Tuesday, March 13 debate would be ignored by TV viewers who’d likely watch the Habs host the New York Islanders), the location (the Liberals proposed holding them in Quebec City for a change, and even the National Assembly’s Salon Rouge for some added gravitas; but the opposition, in particular the ADQ, said that presents some semiotic problems—isn’t the Salon Rouge red, and isn’t red the colour of the Liberals? And doesn’t the solemn location tend to favour the ruling party?) and host (RadCan’s Stéphan Bureau was mooted but shot down, since he and the Liberals have a combative history—another candidate is TVA’s Jacques Moisan).

The debates are the product of the broadcasters and not the Directeur général des élections du Québec’s office, so the TV people run the show. Traditionally, the leader of each party that has a seat in the National Assembly gets to participate in the debates. But Québec solidaire, the lefty party created by Amir Khadir and Françoise David, wants face time too. Too bad, says the DGEQ: because of QS’s unique power structure, neither Khadir nor David are considered the party’s actual leader—anyway, it’s up to the broadcasters to invite whom they choose.