Tom Mulcair: Quebec election results point to need for electoral reform

Hail to “Le Chef.” The Duplessis era has returned in full force. Where the former strongman Union Nationale premier went after Jehovah’s Witnesses, François Legault has targeted just about anyone who’s not like him: immigrants, anglos, religious minorities. He has even stirred the pot with First Nations, for good measure.

His final social media post prior to Election Day wasn’t a stirring appeal based on principle or vision. It was, literally: “vote for me and I’ll send you a cheque of between $400 and $600 before Christmas.”

The disappointing part is that it worked.

Legault will announce a new cabinet soon, and in short order we’ll be back to business.

His incoming Coalition Avenir Québec caucus includes several new MNAs from an array of backgrounds, as well as an Innu woman, Kateri Champagne Jourdain, who won in Duplessis riding. He will be able to put together a cabinet that better reflects Quebec’s diversity. It will be interesting to see if his apparent dog-whistling about immigration carries on after the election.

One subject that’s sure to be front and centre in our political life going forward will be our electoral system. It will be an essential discussion. It’s undemocratic that the Conservatives were shut out despite having received well over 10 per cent of the vote. It’s almost as egregious that the Parti Québécois only managed to win three seats despite winning more votes than the Liberals, who won 21.

It was of some solace for his troops that by dint of electoral fluke and the sudden withdrawal of the Québec solidaire candidate in Camille-Laurin riding, PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has made it into the National Assembly. Based on his strong campaign performance, he will surely become a force to be reckoned with.

Quebec Liberal Leader Dominique Anglade also ran a solid campaign, especially during the closing phases. She accomplished the three things she needed to do: retain Official Opposition status, win more than 20 seats and, most important, win her own. She he will now have the chance to prove her mettle.

She was elected at the height of the pandemic and Legault commanded every microphone and camera in the province for the first two years of her leadership. It will be a more even fight now as the era of Legault’s “rule by decree” thankfully has come to an end.

There will also be an urgent need for Anglade to rebuild the Liberal Party as the hard-fought campaign revealed some structural weaknesses in the once redoubtable “big red machine.”

The so-called anglo protest parties were not even a blip on the screen. The arrival of new powerful voices like those of Désirée McGraw in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Brigitte Garceau in Robert-Baldwin and Elisabeth Prass in D’Arcy-McGee will help revitalize Anglade’s caucus and bring new, inspired vision as they take on Legault in the Assembly.

Québec solidaire did well, but couldn’t live up to the pretensions of its leader, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. It, too, will have an important role to play as its progressive social and environmental visions represent those of many Quebecers.

Our electoral system is called  “first-past the post” because it conjures up the image of a race between a couple of horses. While I wouldn’t ever wish for Quebec to become one of those ungovernable jurisdictions that are purely proportional, it would not be hard to have a mixed-member system where some people make it into the legislature based on the overall percentage of the vote obtained by their parties. We can all have our views as to which party deserved to win, but everyone can see there are inequities in our system that sometimes produce a very unfair result, such as the one that we saw last night. This will be an important debate that Legault can’t be allowed to slough off.

Tom Mulcair, a former leader of the federal NDP, served as minister of the environment in the Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest. 

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