Bloc Québécois

Significance: A new political party was created to contest Canadian general elections on the exclusive issue of sovereignty for Quebec.

The creation of the Bloc Québécois was a direct result of the constitutional turmoil that gripped Canada in the 1980s. Canada had adopted a new constitution in 1982, but the French-speaking province of Quebec refused to accept its legitimacy. Quebec’s refusal was mainly on the grounds that the Constitution failed to give Quebec adequate powers to protect its French language and unique Québécois culture. In order to secure Quebec’s assent, Brian Mulroney, the Canadian prime minister, and all ten provincial leaders met at Meech Lake, Quebec, in 1987, and crafted a series of amendments favorable to Quebec. However, it became increasingly apparent that not all the provincial legislatures would ratify the Meech Lake Accord by the deadline date of June 23, 1990.

Faced with impending defeat, a number of Members of Parliament (MPs) from Quebec, regardless of party affiliation, began to lose hope that the federal government would grant their province enough concessions to justify their remaining within the Canadian federation. If federalism would not work, then full political sovereignty for Quebec was the only plausible alternative. Lucien Bouchard, minister of environment in the Conservative government of Mulroney, resigned on May 21, 1990, citing a loss of faith in the way the government had handled the crisis. Other defections, from both the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, followed.

Party Formation

On July 25, 1990, the newly formed Bloc Québécois (BQ) announced that its primary allegiance was to the nation of Quebec and recognized the province’s legislature, the National Assembly, as the supreme democratic institution of the Québécois people. Its mission was to defend Quebec’s interests in the federal parliament and to promote sovereignty within Quebec. In June, 1991, the BQ transformed itself into a political party.

The Bloc Québécois experienced a good deal of electoral success in its early years. In a federal by-election in east Montreal on August 13, 1990, BQ’s candidate, Gilles Duceppe, captured 66 percent of the vote to become the first sovereignist candidate elected to the Canadian Parliament. In 1992, the Canadian prime minister and the provincial premiers hammered out a series of concessions to Quebec at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Similar in scope to the Meech Lake Accord, these proposals had to be endorsed in referenda held in every province. The Bloc Québécois took the position that the Charlottetown Accord did not go far enough in meeting Quebec’s minimum demands and campaigned against it. The accord was voted down in six out of the ten provinces.

When a general election was called for October, 1993, the BQ fielded candidates in all of Quebec’s seventy-five constituencies. The Liberals and Conservatives in Quebec campaigned on the issues of jobs and employment, but the BQ was the only party to speak consistently on the sovereignty issue. The BQ won a stunning victory, capturing 49 percent of the vote in Quebec and winning fifty-four seats. The BQ did very well among former Conservatives, taking 60 percent of the French-speaking vote. Nationwide, the Liberal Party under the leadership of Jean Chrétien won easily, gaining 177 seats, but because of the complete collapse of the Conservative Party vote, the Bloc Québécois emerged as the second largest party in Parliament and therefore earned the formal status of Official Opposition.

Canadians understandably found it disconcerting that the Official Opposition was a party dedicated to the breaking up of Canada. Compounding the problem was that many MPs of the Bloc Québécois were new to Parliament and had little interest in pan-Canadian or foreign affairs. Although BQ never developed a detailed party program, it emerged as a party that tended to be fiscally conservative and left-of-center on social welfare issues. It gained popularity by opposing the cuts in popular benefit programs proposed by some economy-minded MPs.

Another Victory

In 1994, sovereignists in Quebec scored another victory when the Parti Québécois was elected to power in provincial elections. The victory was undoubtedly more a result of the unpopularity of the outgoing Liberal Party than any dramatic upsurge in sovereignist sentiment. Nevertheless, the new Parti Québécois premier, Jacques Parizeau, promised to hold a referendum on sovereignty during his term of office. In preparation for the forthcoming referendum, a new sovereignist alliance was forged that included the Parti Québécois, the Bloc Québécois, and the Action Démocratique Party, a small splinter party led by Mario Dumont. On June 12, 1995, they agreed that if the sovereignists won the referendum, there would be a year’s time in which to negotiate a new political and economic arrangement with the rest of Canada. Should those talks fail, then Quebec would issue a unilateral declaration of independence.

The promised referendum was held on October 30, 1995. More than 92 percent of Quebec’s electorate voted, with those opposed to sovereignty winning by a narrow margin of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent. Fewer than 54,000 votes out of a total of 4,700,000 separated the two sides. On the day after the election, a disappointed Parizeau announced his intention to resign as Quebec’s premier, and on January 29, 1996, he was succeeded by Bouchard. Because Bouchard had to resign his seat in the House of Commons, Michel Gauthier was chosen leader of the Bloc Québécois. Although the sovereignists were defeated, their response was one of total defiance, confidently believing that the next referendum would finally yield the desired result.

Setbacks

Gauthier served as leader for only one year, and was succeeded by Gilles Duceppe, who would remain leader of the party until 2011. In the 1997 federal election, the Bloc Québécois lost a number of seats, holding only forty-four, and accordingly lost official opposition status to the Reform Party. In December 1999, the Clarity Act, a piece of legislation that would codify the Supreme Court of Canada's 1998 decision that Quebec could not secede unilaterally, was introduced into the House of Commons. The Bloc Québécois focused its energies on fighting the Clarity Act, but it was passed by the House in March of 2000 and by the Senate in June of that year.

In the 2000 election, the Bloc Québécois lost six more seats, which was attributed in part to the Parti Québécois government's forced merger of small municipalities with several major Quebec cities, inculding Montreal, Quebec City, and Hull/Gatineau. The merger was very unpopular, leading more people in Quebec to vote for the Liberal Party. The Bloc Québécois still held more seats than the Liberals after the 2000 election, but after several subsequent by-elections, the Liberals held the majority of Quebec's Parliament seats for the first time in almost twenty years.

Comeback

The federalist Quebec Liberal Party won the 2003 Quebec election, and the Bloc Québécois continued to slide in opinion polls. However, in 2004, the auditor general of Canada found evidence that suggested illegality in the federal government's spending of money to support federalist parties in Quebec, in what would become known as the sponsorship scandal. While the findings of the report on the sponsorship scandal were criticized by a number of Liberal politicians as biased, the scandal shifted political opinions in Quebec in favor of the Bloc Québécois.

In the 2004 election, the BQ won fifty-four seats in the House of Commons, tying its previous record from 1993. When no party secured the necessary majority to form a government, the Conservative Party secretly contacted the BQ in the hopes of forming a coalition to wrest power from the Liberals, but ultimately nothing came of their talks. In the 2006 election, the party was expected to pick up at least six more seats, and did in fact win six former Liberal seats, but also lost eight seats to the Conservative Party and one to an independent candidate, André Arthur. In May 2006, the Conservatives were found to be polling ahead of the BQ in Quebec for the first time.

The BQ won forty-nine seats in the 2008 federal elections, a decrease of two seats, and their proportion of the popular vote in Quebec was the lowest since 1997. Duceppe claimed, however, that the BQ had achieved its main aim of preventing the Conservatives from forming a majority government. In November 2008, the BQ indicated its support for a motion of no confidence against the Conservative government.

In 2011, Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper alleged that the Liberals intended to take control by forming a coalition with the Bloc and the New Democratic Party (NDP), in response to which Duceppe revealed that the Conservatives had tried to do the same thing in 2004.

Loss of Official Status

Due to an upswelling of support for the NDP in the 2011 federal election, the BQ lost forty-four of the forty-seven seats it then held, receiving less than a quarter of the popular vote in Quebec. Duceppe was among those who lost their seats, and consequently resigned as party leader. Daniel Paillé was then elected to succeed him. Official party status in the House of Commons requires a party to hold at least twelve seats; the BQ, holding only four, lost this status, causing its MPs to be treated as independents. An independent MP must sit on the opposition's back benches and cannot be a voting member of parliamentary committees, among other disadvantages.

In February 2013, Claude Patry, an NDP MP, defected to join the BQ due to his support for Quebec sovereignty, bringing the BQ's number of seats held up to five; however, in September of that year, BQ MP Maria Mourani was expelled from the party for opposing the Parti Québécois's proposed Charter of Quebec Values. With Mourani sitting as an independent, the BQ's number of Parliament seats dropped back to four.

Paillé resigned in December 2013 for health reasons; a leadership election was held the following June. Mario Beaulieu, a hardline sovereignist who had never held political office, won a surprise victory over the party caucus's preferred candidate, MP André Bellavance, who ran on a platform of expanding the BQ's primary interests beyond sovereignty. Beaulieu's controversial election led to the defections of Bellavance and Jean-François Fortin, two of the BQ's only remaining MPs. The party's vice president, Annie Lessard, also resigned due to conflict with Beaulieu.

Holding only two seats in Parliament and lagging in the polls, the BQ announced in June 2015 that Duceppe would return to lead the party going into the 2015 federal elections. The party executive agreed to split the positions of party president and party leader so that Duceppe could become the leader, but Beaulieu could remain the president. The BQ won ten seats in the 2015 election, and Duceppe once again failed to win a seat and resigned as party leader.

Bibliography

Boucek, Françoise. Factional Politics: How Dominant Parties Implode or Stabilize. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Harder, Lois, and Steve Patten, eds. The Chrétien Legacy: Politics and Public Policy in Canada. McGill-Queen's UP, 2006.

Smith, David E. Across the Aisle: Opposition in Canadian Politics. U of Toronto P, 2013.