“Mandate, My Ass”
The CAQ, Bill 21 and the Making of Public Opinion (Part 1 of 3)
Quebec is taking yet another ride on the identitaire merry-go-round, courtesy of Prime Minister François Legault. On March 28, the Coalition Avenir du Québec (CAQ) introduced Bill 21 into the National Assembly, which if passed will ban religious symbols for public servants in ‘positions of authority.’ In the hands of the CAQ government, this highly elastic concept has been stretched to include everyone from elementary and secondary school teachers to wildlife park rangers to legal notaries. Like every nauseating twist and turn of the ride since the accommodements raisonnables “crisis”, hijab-wearing Muslims are the principle targets of the legislation, turban- or kippa-wearing men its collateral damage. Enacted in the name of preserving state secularism, Bill 21 will effectively institutionalize hiring discrimination against religious minorities in the public sector.
When the much-anticipated law was deposed in the National Assembly, Legault proudly declared that his government’s desire to protect secularism by trampling all over its basic principles was supported by the “vast majority of Quebeckers.” Over and over again, the CAQ has defended its deformed notion of secularism on the grounds that it is What the People Want. Every time protesters have marched against the proposed ban, every time jurists have decried how the law violates people’s Charter-protected rights, every time journalists have asked for even one concrete example justifying the legislation, Legault and his ministers wave the magic wand of public opinion to make these objections disappear.
Undeniably, the identitaire narrative of What the People Want is hegemonic. Pollsters and the rest of the corporate media have uncritically adopted the notion that a strong and unassailable consensus exists (at least among francophone Quebeckers) in favour of banning religious symbols. On the left, and even among the ranks of the province’s growing anti-racist movement, the state of public opinion is frequently lamented but rarely disputed.
But the strength of the CAQ’s mandate to ban religious symbols is in fact highly debatable and the consensus largely ephemeral. While the media often report that Bill 21 is supported by two-thirds of Quebeckers, a more comprehensive look at polling since the CAQ’s election shows that support for the ban could be as low as 41%. Opposition in public opinion to Bill 21 is also broader and more substantial than is frequently reported — more than 40% according to several polls and as high as 59% in one instance. Much depends on how polling firms pose the question, i.e. which symbols are referred to, and what consequences the ban entails. Proposals to ban religious symbols in the public sector “are, at first sight, popular,” political analyst Michel C. Auger noted shortly after Legault’s election. But when one takes a closer look, “polls also show that support ends as soon as there starts to be talk of sanctions and lost jobs. Even more so when the courts rule that the law violates fundamental rights.”
Public opinion on the issue is not only far more divided, it is also far more indifferent than the reigning populist mythology would lead us to believe. Reporting on the issue frequently gives the impression that most Quebeckers are clamouring for a ban on religious symbols in the public sector. Yet poll after poll shows that the identitaire right’s obsession with banning the hijab in the name of secularism does not correspond to the political preoccupations of most Quebeckers. Making this issue the CAQ government’s top legislative priority serves only the wishes of a xenophobic minority masquerading as the “Québécois people,” a charade that has gone on far too long.
The CAQ victory on October 1, 2018 was widely interpreted as evidence that the tidal wave of right-wing populism sweeping over the West since 2016 had finally reached Quebec’s shores. Most polls had predicted at best a minority government for the CAQ, but after a campaign in which debates over immigration often occupied centre stage François Legault’s party secured a sizable majority in the National Assembly.
Legault confirmed those impressions at his first press conference as Prime Minister on October 3, when he announced that the CAQ’s top legislative priority would be a ban on religious symbols. The former businessman-turned-politician insisted that “the vast majority of Quebeckers would like to have a framework that provides that people in positions of authority must not wear religious symbols.” Since then, Legault and his ministers have repeated ad nauseum that voters gave the CAQ a “strong mandate” to restrict religious symbols and that their position represents a “consensus” supported by the “vast majority” of Quebeckers.
The CAQ ’s victory owed much to the strange alchemy of Quebec’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Thanks to a set-up that persistently turns electoral minorities into parliamentary majorities, Legault’s team was awarded 74 of the National Assembly’s 125 seats with the support of only 37.4% of voters. The apparent landslide is even less impressive when looked at in light of the 2018 election’s record-high abstention rate.* One-third of Quebec’s 6.2 million registered voters stayed home on October 1, which meant that Legault and the CAQ needed just 1.5 million votes — representing less than a quarter (24.5%) of registered voters — to secure their parliamentary majority.
Among those who voted for the CAQ, how many were motivated by their stance on religious symbols? In the pre-electoral period, polls indicated that this subject did not excite the passions of many Quebeckers. When debates raged in the media over Sondos Lamrhari’s hijab (a CEGEP student and aspiring police officer), over three-quarters (78 per cent) of Quebeckers told pollsters they felt that too much time was spent debating religious symbols and reasonable accommodations. And contrary to identitaire mythology, over 80 per cent of caquistes said that they too were eager to move on to something else, only slightly less than Liberals (84 per cent) (Ipsos, April 29-May 2). A 2018 end-of-year poll found equally little interest for this supposed ‘hot-button’ issue. Only 19% of francophone Quebeckers cited religious symbols as the social issue in the media that had most captured their attention over the last year, while two-and-a-half times more (47%) selected the legalization of marijuana (SOM, December 5–7).
Prior to the 2018 campaign, the rise of the CAQ was generally understood as having little to do with identitaire issues. Until late 2016, the CAQ had trailed both the Liberals and the PQ in voting intentions, seemingly stuck in the awkward role of third-place opposition party. The CAQ, however, started gaining momentum in the polls in 2017, overtaking the PQ in the first few month of the year and challenging the Liberals by the start of 2018. Pollsters at the time attributed its surging support to popular frustrations with austerity measures, Liberal corruption scandals and a more general distaste for politics-as-usual, rather than any enthusiasm for the CAQ’s identitaire-tinged programme. “The problem of the CAQ,” pollster Jean-Marc Léger noted in June 2017, “is that it is more an anti-party vote than a pro-CAQ vote.”
During the 2018 campaign, the issue of religious symbols was so marginal that polling firms did not bother to ask voters about it. Immigration was a major topic of debate, but only 16% of eligible voters chose immigration as one of the top two most important issues influencing their vote, ranking the issue sixth out of nine possible choices (Ipsos, September 20–23). The trifecta of immigration, language and identity which supposedly so galvanized the electorate ranked last in terms of voters’ priorities (Léger, September 14–17), far behind health care and social services, jobs and the economy and education and aid to families. (It was also less influential than climate change and environmental issues, about which the CAQ programme said virtually nothing.) For youth in particular, identitaire issues did not resonate. Only 7% of youth (18–25 years old) said immigration was one of the top two issues influencing their decision, ranking it 10th out of 14 possible choices (Ipsos Youth Survey, August 31-September 6).
Anger and exasperation with Philippe Couillard’s austerity-obsessed Liberal government came through much more clearly in the polls. After 15 years of almost unbroken Liberal rule, two-thirds of voters said they felt it was time to kick the bums out, while barely one-fifth of Quebeckers wanted to keep the Couillard’s administration in office. Frustration with the Liberals was strongest among Francophones, in the Montreal suburbs, in Québec City and in the rest of Quebec, where voters favouring change outnumbered those inclined to continuity by margins of 4-to-1 or even 6-to-1 (Léger, September 14–17; Ipsos, September 20–23). These segments of the electorate, not surprisingly, were those that powered the CAQ’s victory at the polls.
Questions of immigration and secularism were not make-or-break issues for many caquistes. CAQ voters’ relative indifference to identitaire themes was reflected in their second choices, which leaned more towards parties that did not play the xenophobic nationalism card (QS and the PLQ) than to the other party that did (PQ). (32.7% vs. 28.5% according to Mainstreet, September 26–27; 38% vs. 33% according to Léger, September 14–17). In previous elections where reasonable accommodations and religious symbols were central themes (2007, 2014), pollsters found that identitaire themes consistently ranked near the bottom of most Quebeckers’ political priorities.
Post-election polling confirms that identitaire issues were at best secondary concerns for most voters. When Ipsos asked CAQ voters the open-ended question, “What is the principle reason behind your vote?”, only 2% cited their stance on immigration and less than one in five (19%) said they made their choice based on a positive appreciation of the party, its policies and its leader, or out of agreement with its values and ideology. Nearly two-thirds (64%) cited the need for change, the desire to give the Liberals the boot, or the sense that the CAQ represented the ‘lesser evil.’ (Ipsos, n.d.) Other polls have confirmed that relative to other parties, CAQ voters were disproportionately un-ideological, with one in four (25.6%) avowing that their vote was strategic and less than half (43.6%) saying they voted for the party’s policies (Vox Pop Labs, October 10–25).
Despite Legault’s widely-reported promise at the start of the campaign to ban religious symbols for public employees in positions of authority, the Ipsos poll showed the issue to have been almost totally absent from the minds of CAQ voters. “After having searched for any response concerning the issue of secularism, we found only one mention of secularism and two mentions relating to Christianity, but none about the wearing of religious symbols,” noted political analyst Claire Durand, who helped design the survey. Although CAQ voters expressed more hostility to immigration than most voters, this did not clearly determine their choice at the ballot box. The vote for the CAQ “appears first and foremost as a negative vote,” Durand concluded.
Or as Gil Scott-Heron put it in his 1981 song “B-Movie,” after Ronald Reagan won the presidency with only 26% of registered voters behind him: “Mandate, my ass.”
Read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
* The only election with a lower turnout rate was the December 2008 general election, in which only 57.43% of registered voters participated, the lowest rate in 70 years. The 2008 anomaly was likely due to the collapse of the ADQ vote and voter fatigue; the Charest Liberals called a snap election less than two years after the 2007 general elections. In the 2018 election, 66.45% of registered electors exercised their right to vote, making it the second-lowest turnout in Quebec’s modern political history. Thanks to Marie-Léger St-Jean for this correction.