No Separation Anxiety for Voters in Quebec Premier Race

Quebec isn’t a country, and most people want it to stay that way.

Melanie Dore certainly does. She was born in the 1970s, when the separatist movement was at its peak of passion, and the topic today seems awfully outdated and terribly tiresome.

Yet when she votes for a new provincial premier Nov. 30, there is a good chance that she will vote for the incumbent, Lucien Bouchard, an avowed separatist, rather than Jean Charest, who has made abandoning the idea the centerpiece of his campaign. She likes the job Bouchard has done, if not the dream he harbors.

“People can vote for Bouchard and be against sovereignty,” says Dore, a fashion school graduate who works in a video store in this working-class town in southern Quebec. “People vote for the man. Bouchard, I like him.”

This is the incongruity that confronts Quebec as it prepares for provincial elections. Polls show that many people oppose separation but favor the separatist, that they are sick of the subject yet want to keep the option available, like a nuclear missile aimed at Ottawa.

These people make up the soft center of a complex electorate, the mushy middle between the die-hard separatists--much of the French-speaking majority--and the hard-core federalists, who include the bulk of the English-speaking minority.

Nowhere do votes swing more with the times than in St. Jean, the legendary bellwether of Quebec politics.

It is famous for waffling yet winning: It has picked every victorious premier since 1939. The only time it diverged was in 1995, when it narrowly voted for secession while the province as a whole barely said no.

It is part of what is known as the 450, the area code for the swath of towns that curves like a scimitar around Montreal, making up a sort of neutral zone between the city, where the cosmopolitan urbanites are mainly federalist, and the solid French separatists of the country.

“That is where the election is going to be decided,” said Howard Cody, a Canada scholar at the University of Maine.

“They want to keep sovereignty as sort of a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the Canadian government. But they don’t want to bite the bullet and just leave.”

With a week left in the race, polls show that Bouchard and his Parti Quebecois have managed to appeal most to the swing vote.

“If we have the election today, the PQ will form the government,” Jean-Marc Leger, a leading pollster, said Friday.

After rejecting sovereignty twice in 15 years, most people do not even want another opportunity to vote on secession, Leger said.

“People are tired of it,” he said.

And confused.

Though most people say they are against sovereignty, he said, they uniformly want the specific things that sovereignty entails, such as provincial control over foreign policy.

Incumbent’s Campaign Based on His Record

Without abandoning his independence stance, Bouchard has managed to give his message a suitably Rorschach quality: The soft center sees what it wants. He said he would hold another referendum only under “winning conditions,” meaning only if it would win.

While his critics have tried vainly for specifics--some believe that just winning the election next week constitutes “winning conditions”--Bouchard has made paradox his pitch, saying Quebec needs a secessionist even if it stays in Canada.

“The only gains we made in Ottawa were made by a separatist government,” Bouchard said during the televised debate last week with Charest and third-party candidate Mario Dumont. “What I want is to use leverage with our Canadian neighbors.”

Bouchard has campaigned on his record and the perception of many that he has done a good job.

He has moved his party more toward the center, presided over a drop in joblessness and balanced the budget for the first time this decade.

Charest and his Liberals say secession uncertainty has been a “ball and chain” on economic growth and foreign investment.

He hits hard at the government’s bloated bureaucracy, the highest taxes on the continent, the highest unemployment in Canada and recent cuts in health care.

Opposition Campaign Seen as Uninspired

During a campaign trip to St. Jean on Thursday, Charest was asked how he reaches these enigmatic voters who do not want secession yet buy Bouchard’s argument that only a separatist can stand up for Quebec.

“You tell them that they are going to get a referendum in the next four or five years, and the economy is going to continue to go down,” Charest said. “We’re going to hammer away at it.”

Yet Charest has left many would-be supporters cold.

Once a front-runner, his campaign has been uninspiring.

“He doesn’t look very lively,” said Robert A. Young, a University of Western Ontario economist and Quebec expert.

This is good news for candidates riding Bouchard’s coattails, particularly here.

Roger Paquin, a former biology teacher, ran for the local National Assembly seat four years ago, and the race was so tight that the initial results showed him winning by 58 votes. After the bad ballots were voided--some voters had drawn smiley faces across their candidates’ names, for example--Paquin was losing by 25.

A recount lasted three excruciating weeks. A friend of Paquin’s fretted so much that he had a heart attack. Suspense was so high that a TV news cameraman rode a crane up to a window to film a sweating judge tallying the final ballots.

The vote, finally, was in: The two candidates had tied.

A new election was called and the campaign was rerun in 22 days. This time, Paquin won a wafer-thin mandate.

Today, Paquin’s people have visited or phoned three-quarters of the 28,000 local households. And what they are saying makes him something of a smiley face himself.

“Have you seen the Liberals?” asked Paquin, gesturing down the road toward the opposition headquarters. “They have very dour expressions.”

Paquin said talks with counterparts south of the border--St. Jean is minutes from New York and Vermont--convince him that secession would not hurt U.S. relations.

“We believe the United States would recognize their friend north of the border,” he said.

Not so fast, said James Blanchard, the former U.S. ambassador who worked behind the scenes on behalf of President Clinton to discourage a “yes” vote during the 1995 independence referendum.

He said an independent Quebec would have to reapply for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which means it would need permission from Canada.

“Quebec would be on its knees to Ottawa to get in,” Blanchard told a Montreal radio station last week.

Voters Fed Up With Separation Issue

Francois Mercier first voted for Quebec sovereignty in 1980, when he was a young man and the idea seemed bold and provocative and right. He voted for it less enthusiastically in 1995. Now he’s 37, and he says he’s not sure anymore.

“I’m really fed up with it,” said Mercier, standing outside the St. Jean College building where he teaches agriculture. “I voted yes the last time just so it would end. Now, if there’s another one, I don’t know. I’m not a hard ‘yes.’ ”

Melanie Dore is a hard “no,” yet like Mercier she is thinking about voting for Bouchard. Like Mercier, she has become so inured to the secession debate that she has subtracted it from the election equation.

It is, she said, a boring story.

“People here follow the Clinton story much more religiously,” she said, smiling with relish. “It’s so scandalous.”

Andrew Van Velzen of The Times’ Toronto Bureau contributed to this report.