Forum du Québécois

Who votes ADQ?
Thirty-one percent of Quebecers voted for Mario Dumont's party. Figuring out who they are and what they want is the tricky part.
Philippe Gohier, Macleans.ca | Mar 29, 2007 | 6:24 pm EST

On the night that he shocked political observers by leading the Action démocratique du Québec to Official Opposition, Mario Dumont nearly made news in a way he certainly didn't want.

At a euphoric election night celebration, Dumont thanked Quebecers for their "enthusiastic endorsement of the ADQ's autonomist vision." Then he proclaimed his party's success was the celebration of a vision that falls in line with the legacy "of great premiers like Re-... like Jean Lesage."

Before he caught himself, Dumont had apparently been on the verge of citing René Lévesque as the principal influence behind his party's national vision. (Watch for it around the halfway mark in this video.) It may have been little more than a slip of the tongue: Parti Québécois leader André Boisclair had repeated Lévesque's name so often in the campaign, it became difficult to remember anyone else had ever been premier. But given the opacity of Dumont's "autonomist" stance on the national question (and the fact he was reading his speech), the question has to be asked: What if he meant to say René Lévesque?

Equally importantly, what if had actually done so? Would federalists have extended the ADQ leader such a warm embrace if he'd dared mention the father of the modern sovereignist movement on the most important night of his electoral career? And how would it have changed their perception of why so many Quebecers voted for him?

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News of Dumont's second-place finish - and the corresponding turfing of the PQ as official opposition - had Canadians outside Quebec (and some inside it) eagerly dancing on the grave of separatism. So far, very few have shied away from greeting Dumont's electoral success as anything less than the dawn of a new era in Canadian politics - the end of an ugly rivalry between Quebec City and Ottawa.

“I think it’s turning a page and entering a fundamentally new chapter," Patrick Monahan, the dean of Osgoode Hall law school and a senior policy advisor to Ontario premier David Peterson during the Meech Lake talks, told Macleans.ca. "I think that it’s really a healthy and welcome turn - not only for Quebec but for Quebec-Canada relations."

In Ottawa, the Conservatives' efforts at boosting Jean Charest's election chances - from delivering a Quebec-friendly budget one week before the vote to suggesting a sovereignist party would not be invited to the table to negotiate federal spending powers - failed to deliver the federalist majority they had hoped for. But a reeling PQ was certainly a development worth celebrating.

"We're feeling good about the fact that the separatists are at their lowest point since 1970 [...] and the Bloc is at their lowest point ever in the polls," Conservative MP Jason Kenney said the day after the election. "That's a sign of Stephen Harper's success as a leader for Canada."

But for a party credited with the province's greatest paradigm shift since the PQ bumped Maurice Duplessis's right-wing Union Nationale off the political stage, the ADQ's support base has been surprisingly hard to pin down. And as Dumont's hesitation in his speech showed, that's especially true when it comes to its vision of Quebec's relationship with the rest of Canada.

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Prior to Monday's vote, party lines in Quebec broke down along demographics.

The Liberal party was home to the province's anglophones, its older voters and most of its immigrant communities. And the Parti Québécois could count on the youth vote, as well as the artistic community and the province's pure-laine francophone regions.

The ADQ, on the other hand, was seen as little more than a rural protest party intent on chiding the province for its post-Quiet Revolution excesses. And even now, it remains something of a mystery how exactly it broke its rural image so successfully that it captured seats in bedroom communities around Montreal and swept nearly every riding in Quebec City.

"They're the young families and the grandparents too," Jean-François Gosselin, the newly-elected ADQ MNA in Quebec City's Jean-Lesage riding, says of the party's base. "If I go to the mall this afternoon, I'll see the types of people who supported me throughout my campaign."
But the ADQ's base also includes some of the more marginal constituencies.

Patrick Bourgeois, editor of the prominent sovereignist journal Le Québécois, told Macleans.ca that many hard-line sovereignists - the purs et durs - became disaffected by the PQ's increasingly urban, multicultural profile and gravitated to the ADQ because of party's vocal opposition to accommodations for religious minorities.

Moreover, he said, they found signs in the ADQ's platform - like its call for the establishment of a Quebec constitution - that the party was committed to moving ahead with "des gestes de rupture" (acts of rupture with the federal government) with greater zeal than the PQ was willing to.

"It seduced many of the purs et durs, who said to themselves: 'With the PQ doing nothing one way or another, might as well go to the ADQ in the meantime to move Quebec ahead'," said Bourgeois, a self-described pur et dur. "At the same time, Dumont's stance in the 'reasonable accommodations' debate was attracting them as well.

"Let's face it," Bourgeois assessed, "ethnic nationalism is a lot more prominent among that clientele than the civic nationalism promoted by Boisclair-style péquistes."
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Ironically, many small-c conservatives dismayed at Charest's reluctance to challenge the much-maligned "Quebec model" were shifting their support from the Liberals to the ADQ at the same time sovereignist hard-liners - traditionally the strongest supporters of that model - were leaving the PQ.

Conservative blogger Adam Daifallah, who is based out of Quebec City, told Macleans.ca that the sheer novelty of the party's willingness to question the province's entrenched social-democratic welfare state was enough to convince people like him to keep the ADQ in mind. Although he himself ended up voting for the Liberal candidate in his riding, Daifallah explains that while his "head was with Charest," his "heart was with [Dumont]."

"They're the only party willing to question the sacred cows of the Quebec state," Daifallah said of the ADQ. "Mario Dumont, as far as I know, is the only leader of any mainstream political party in Canada - federal or provincial - who openly avows two-tier health-care. Things like that drew me towards them - just their ability to question these things that are taken for granted."

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At least publicly, the ADQ has yet to garner the same kind of reverence from Quebec's media establishment as the PQ or the Liberals have been able to count on. And to the extent that it has picked up high-profile support, it has hardly been from a single identifiable base - its most vocal supporters ranging from Quebec City's staunchly federalist former king of trash radio, Jeff Fillion, to resolutely sovereignist author Victor-Lévy Beaulieu. In between, there has been little to define the party's appeal as anything beyond Dumont's personal charm.

Now that they're gathering steam, Jean-François Gosselin says, "people are suddenly flooding into the party." And therein lies Dumont's first challenge as a mainstream politician: to shape that growing but disparate support base into something more than a political vanity project.
Until then, he'll be able to rely on an unusual amount of support from federalists not generally inclined to give Quebec politicians the benefit of the doubt. By the time their gaze turns away from the PQ's demise and toward Dumont's upstart populists, there's no telling what they'll find.
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