OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau’s Quebec lieutenant admits that federalists should organize and counterattack separatist rhetoric as the threat of a future referendum on Québec sovereignty in a potential Parti Québécois government continues to grow.
“We will have to draw a contrast with things that are more important for Quebecers and more advantageous for Quebecers as federal Liberals,” said minister Jean-Yves Duclos in an interview with the National Post.
“The importance of education about the benefits of being part of Canada cannot be underestimated. This is something… that we must continually remember,” he added.
Duclos was reacting to a report by three economists and a former senator that criticized the “Year 1 Budget,” a theoretical budget in the event of a sovereign Quebec presented a year ago by the Parti Québécois.
The PQ claims that an independent Quebec would be economically prosperous and would seek to obtain $82.3 billion in new revenues “that are currently captured by the federal government, and which currently correspond to very few useful services for the population.”
At the time, Duclos and his Quebec colleagues dismissed the exercise as a “fanciful budget” and “not a priority.”
A year later, Minister Duclos says Quebec independence is still not a priority for Quebecers, but like many other federalists in the province, he believes the Parti Québécois is forcing a response.
The separatists, who lead public opinion polls at both the provincial and federal levels in Quebec, have become increasingly vocal about their views and the possibility of holding a referendum during a first mandate of a PQ government.
When the party announced its first-year budget, many federalists thought it would make headlines for a few days and then fade away. After all, according to Léger, 35 per cent of Quebecers are in favour of independence and 63 per cent are not concerned about the separation of the province from Canada.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s PQ has nevertheless been leading the polls for almost a year and is using the October 2023 document to defend the value of a Quebec country. It’s been a year and almost no one has responded or questioned its arguments.
“It is an indication that we, the federalists, have made a strategic error. And this is the kind of error that we should not continue to make, andwe must respond to the arguments,” says former Senator André Pratte in an interview.
So he did. With three economists, they published earlier this week a 25 pages critique of the PQ document.
Their conclusion is harsh. They call the billions of dollars in efficiency gains a “myth,” criticize a lack of seriousness in the defence budget (the PQ proposes to invest 0.65 per cent of Quebec’s GDP) and a miscalculation in the amount of Canadian national debt that Quebec would inherit. They acknowledge that Quebec could be economically viable as a country, but that it would be far from the “paradise” scenario advocated by the PQ.
“The Year 1 budget is simply not a rigorous document in economic and budgetary terms. It is a political argument whose economic foundations are extremely fragile,” write the economists.
They say their efforts aren’t partisan and that it is an independent exercise based on facts. “We are not saying that federalism is preferable, we are simply saying that the document and the hypotheses prepared by the Parti Québécois do not hold water,” says Robert Gagné, professor at HEC Montréal and one of the three economists who produced the report with Pratte.
The PQ leader quickly attacked the authors, calling their work “political” and a tactic of the “NO camp” and the Quebec Liberal Party.
“André Pratte has therefore essentially decided to get the NO camp back on its feet and it took him a full year to publish an argument that is relatively easy to debunk,” St-Pierre Plamondon wrote on social media, accusing the former senator and journalist of orchestrating a “fear campaign.”
St-Pierre Plamondon went so far as to “humbly” refer to the NO camp as “Pratte Patrol,” a nod to the popular Canadian cartoon franchise Paw Patrol.
Neither Pratte nor Duclos will say that the NO camp is on the move but conceded that federalists should be prepared. Recently, Quebec federal minister Steven MacKinnon attacked the Bloc Québécois’ vision of independence in a debate on seniors.
Additionally, former principal secretary and confidant to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Gerald Butts, recently wrote an op-ed arguing that a Quebec secession crisis is coming.
“I’m talking about an increasingly likely Quebec secession referendum within the next three to five years. One that will be so dissimilar to its two antecedents that we should think of it as a Quebexit event rather than another Canadian identity crisis,” wrote Butts.
Last August, the Quebec Liberal Party proposed a debate on a Quebec constitution.
Now that the response to the Year 1 budget has been released, both camps are eager to debate the future of Quebec in the federation.
The federalist versus separatist duel has been largely sidelined since the first election of the Coalition Avenir Québec, a nationalist party with little interest in this traditional debate. That’s no longer the case, says PQ economic critic Gabriel Coulombe.
“I think that in the coming months and years, this will necessarily become a polarizing issue around which the debate will be structured in this context,” he said.
In Quebec, separatists see the federalists as a hockey team that uses the “trap technique” to stop or break its opponent’s progress. But their motivation is running high.
“The question is not whether we will progress, but to what extent and how quickly the separatists will progress,” Coulombe said.
And the other side knows it.
“We have to look at what is happening and be intelligent and prudent in our responses to the events that are happening in Quebec,” said Mr. Pratte.
National Post
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