Erin O’Toole may look back on the day following the first French debate as the turning point in his purposeful path to government.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on September 13, 2021.

Quebec Premier François Legault’s “dangerous” claims may have just cost Erin O’Toole the election.

Angry warnings not to vote for Liberals, New Democrats, or Greens were supposed to help the Conservative leader. Early in the campaign, Legault made it very clear that his sympathies were with O’Toole.

But that was before O’Toole revealed that part of his costed platform, meant cancelling a $6-billion daycare transfer already inked in principle by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premier.

Now Legault is hedging his bets, calling on Quebecers to support a nationalist party that will devolve more powers with no conditions to Quebec.

He is also suggesting that the best outcome would be a Conservative minority with a strong Bloc Québécois contingent.

That pitch from a self-described “nationalist” can only serve to help the Bloc Québécois, which is fighting to defeat Conservatives in multiple eastern Quebec ridings.

Legault’s intervention will serve to solidify the Liberal vote in the greater Montreal area, and drive wavering federalists back into the Liberal camp.

But it may be more costly for O’Toole in the rest of Canada as Legault is lauding the Tory leader for staying out of Quebec’s business.

The premier is particularly irate that Trudeau has expressed support for community groups wanting to fight the new Quebec law prohibiting public sector workers from wearing hijabs, kippahs, and turbans.

Trudeau is the only federal leader who has spoken out against this nationalist firing offence. Even turban wearing Jagmeet Singh vows he will not protect the right to religious headgear because to do so would interfere with provincial jurisdiction.

In another pitch for nationalist votes, during the French debate, Singh underscored his party’s commitment to the Sherbrooke declaration, where New Democrats vow that a simple majority in a provincial referendum is sufficient to break up Canada.

But his debate appeal to the ghost of Jack Layton has not moved many votes in Quebec as most observers expect the party to win only one or two of the 78 seats in the province.

The biggest boomerang effect of the Legault intervention may come from outside Quebec.

During the French TVA debate, a senior citizen from New Brunswick pleaded for federal involvement to develop national standards for long-term care.

Legault wants federal cash for care, but no conditions attached. O’Toole is promising just such help, even though more than 4,000 Quebecers died during the pandemic while in provincial long-term care.

As Trudeau pointed out during the French-language televised debate on Sept. 8, the premier didn’t mind calling in the Canadian Army when the bodies started piling up.

Quebec nationalists may want to give their premier more powers but if the pandemic has taught us something, it is that our health-care system needs more federal help.

At the moment, we are rolling out multiple vaccine systems and the confusion around the vaccine passport is a direct result of the federated health system.

Trudeau says it is his duty to protect the Canada Health Act. O’Toole says he supports some privatization and wants to transfer billions in unconditional cash transfers. The fine print of his promise shows financing is backloaded, with most monies not coming for another half-decade.

In a tight election, the statement by Legault may turn out to be the kiss of death.

As we near the finish line, this race is still too close to call. This is not where the O’Toole expected to be after a galloping campaign start.

His momentum stalled at the first debate as soon as Trudeau pointedly attacked O’Toole’s page 90 promise to end the ban on assault weapons.

O’Toole’s first mistake was including the issue in his lengthy playbook in the first place. But he added fuel to the fire by calling a press conference the following day to focus on his anti-crime strategy.

What was supposed to be a platform on how to stem the increase in urban gang violence during the Trudeau tenure ended up being damage control on why the guns that killed 14 women in École Polytechnique would be legalized under his watch.

O’Toole may look back on the day following the first French debate as the turning point in his purposeful path to government. Until that moment, O’Toole had been sticking to his knitting, referencing his famous plan; smiling and calmly projecting the image of a potential prime minister.

The first debate shattered that image and started his downward spiral.

O’Toole’s fall from grace, and potential victory, was further accelerated by Legault’s nationalist blessing.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

Quebecers will band together to promote French and governments need to have their back. But not at the expense of francophones in the rest of Canada.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on February 22, 2021.

Economic Development and Official Languages Minister Melanie Joly’s white paper on official languages has not even been released and already the opposition parties are lining up against it.

In a speech in November, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole accused the Liberals of refusing “to protect French in Quebec because they did not want to harm linguistic minorities in other parts of the country.”

O’Toole went on to claim media pundits were acting in bad faith by comparing the anglophone minority in Quebec to francophones outside Quebec. He claimed that was a “false equivalency.”

To that end, the Conservative party under his leadership is vowing to apply Quebec’s Bill 101 to federally regulated businesses in that province.

On the face of it, that does not seem like a big deal.

But by adopting a provincial language law, the federal government would be throwing millions of francophones outside Quebec under the bus.

If one province is successful in ensuring that its language laws can also override federal jurisdiction, it won’t be long before anti-French campaigns in other parts of the country close down schools and services that are currently funded, in part, by federal language policy and laws.

Joly is treading on very dangerous ground with this white paper, because all opposition parties are lining up to turn it into an anti-French attack by the Laurentian Liberals on la belle province.

The moribund Bloc is dying for an opportunity to drive a wedge into the relationship between francophones and anglophones in the country.

A language war is the only way to convince nationalist Quebecers that supporting the sovereigntists in an election is not a lost cause.

The Tories are trying to re-establish themselves as the party of the Union Nationale and the old Progressive Conservatives, when federal election victories were always dependent on support from Quebec nationalists.

As for the New Democratic Party, it has already thrown its lot in with the separatists. The Sherbrooke Declaration, which was a fairly calculated move by Tom Mulcair and Jack Layton to attract Quebecers, would basically give Canada away with a referendum vote of a simple majority.

Jagmeet Singh has already endorsed the declaration, and the last campaign solidified his attachment to separation, when his Quebec members moved away from their support for social democracy and focussed instead on sovereignty and the right to separate.

Even with that carrot, the party bled votes in Quebec, but when it comes to language laws, the Liberals will be alone in their support for a federal language policy that could apply across the country.

Already the Quebec National Assembly has moved unanimously to support the position of the government that all Quebecers and all services, should be governed by provincial language laws only.

The newly minted provincial Liberal leader followed in the footsteps of her predecessors by falling in line on Bill 101 without even bothering to suggest a single amendment.

That is not surprising as it is common knowledge in Quebec political circles that most provincial Liberals are actually federal Tories. That is why former Quebec premier Jean Charest moved with ease between the two parties at the federal and provincial level.

But if the white paper content and rollout is not properly managed, the Liberals could back themselves into a corner in strategically vote-rich Quebec.

If Quebecers feel attacked, they will immediately band together and vote en masse. And that capacity to vote collectively could change the outcome of the election.

That is why Quebec-born Erin O’Toole was out early on his party’s position on Bill 101. He knows this could play very well in certain parts of the province that he desperately needs to form government.

The white paper may succeed in lowering the temperature, which is what the Liberals need to kill a divisive language issue on the eve of an election.

Joly has excellent communication skills in both official languages, but as she discovered on the Netflix file, the devil is in the details.

You can rest assured the Prime Minister’s Office will be combing through details of the document, looking for potential pitfalls.

The Liberals have already taken a beating in Quebec on the decision to grandfather possession of military assault rifles and defer to municipalities on the decision to ban handguns.

That won’t be too damaging because the other parties do not want a legislative gun battle.

But language is a different story.

Quebecers will band together to promote French and governments need to have their back. But not at the expense of francophones in the rest of Canada.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

First published on Monday, September 25, 2017 in The Hill Times.

OTTAWA—The New Democratic Party turban wars were officially launched last weekend.

The first toxic, anti-turban bomb dropped was dropped by Quebec NDP MP Pierre Nantel on the eve of a leadership pre-vote launch in Hamilton.

Nantel characterized candidate Jagmeet Singh’s religious garb as “ostentatious” and “not compatible with power.”

Party officials and candidates moved immediately to distance themselves from his inflammatory pronouncement.

But the salvo served to highlight the schism between Quebec New Democrats and the rest of their membership across Canada.

Singh’s biggest challenge will not be getting a seat in the House of Commons. It will be getting elected as New Democratic party leader.

Unless he wins the lengthy first-round vote that began last Monday, the Ontario NDP deputy leader will be swiftly returned to Queen’s Park.

Front-runner status is never a good thing in a race that has more than two candidates.

For better or for worse, there is an “anybody but,” phenomenon that comes into play when supporters of other candidates have to make a second choice.

Singh also appears to be the sole candidate to speak out strongly against proposed Quebec legislation limiting certain visible religious symbols in public service dealings.

While Singh has come out squarely against the bill, Quebec-based candidate Guy Caron has taken the opposite position. He says the Sherbrooke Declaration makes it clear this has nothing to do with the federal NDP.

Leadership candidates Charlie Angus and Niki Ashton were left scrambling in the middle when trying to explain their perspectives during media scrums at the largely English-speaking Hamilton vote launch.

Experienced Parliamentarians, they both clearly understood that more than one-third of the current NDP parliamentary caucus hails from Quebec. Most are supporters of the Sherbrooke Declaration, affirming the right to separate from the country by a simple majority vote.

It was that declaration that encouraged disaffected Quebec separatists to join the NDP during the heyday of the Jack Layton Orange Crush.

If Singh breaks with that dogma, he will definitely face opposition from Quebec delegates. Nantel, who threatened to quit the party last week, has already been the subject of media speculation that he will quit the party to run provincially for the Parti Québécois.

In mathematical terms, Quebec support does not count for much in this race. There are currently fewer than 5,000 members in the province.

Compare those numbers to the additional 47,000 new members that Singh says he has signed up since his entrance into the race only four months ago.

On the face of it, those numbers are very impressive.

But because they are largely concentrated in a few key ridings across the country, they do raise questions about the national electability factor, which looms large in any party’s decision about the choice of a new leader.

The NDP voting system is largely to blame for this anomaly. Current party rules allow every member to have a vote, but they do not include a weighting system to reflect regional balance.

Under this new selection process, a single riding in Ontario, like Brampton, will likely exercise greater influence in the choice of the new leader than the whole province of Quebec.

That doesn’t matter much in the leadership race runoff, but it sure counts in an election. So it makes sense for party voting systems to mirror electoral reality.

The reason we have Canadian federal votes weighted by province and riding is to ensure that all parts of the country are given an opportunity to make their choice.

In the current electoral system, rural ridings have numerically more influence than votes in concentrated urban centres because the challenge of travel in a large geographic area is balanced by fewer voters per constituency.

The changes, adopted to counter this, have lead to the creation of a new voting system with similar potential for skewing.

Whatever the outcome, the first job of the new leader will be to heal internal divisions.

If Singh wins, the haemorrhage of Quebec support for the party will continue.

If he loses, the damage done from the NDP turban wars will be felt by the party in other key parts of the country.

Whatever the outcome, this will likely be the last NDP leadership vote where a single constituency can override a province.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

OTTAWA—New Democratic Leader Tom Mulcair may have difficulty staying out of the numbers game. He is doing his best to avoid the trap, saying he will work to secure the support of all party members.

But Mulcair may not have a choice, with NDP Party President Rebecca Blaikie tossing around a challenge even more onerous than the one that sunk former Conservative leader, ousted prime minister Joe Clark.

When the party president cites a number, the die is cast. No one can blame Mulcair for staying away from the numbers game. Many before him have suffered from that fatal mistake.

But it also begs the question on the silent killer of sitting New Democrats in the last election. Why does it take 70 per cent of a party to affirm a leader and only fifty per cent to break up a country?

Mulcair’s orchestration of the Sherbrooke Declaration and the killing of the Clarity Act was a deadly electoral mistake in most of the country, except Quebec. It was the one error he did not even mention in recent interviews providing an autopsy of his own mistakes.

Mulcair’s biggest challenge will be to re-establish socialist credentials. The voting public may prefer the moderate middle. But the New Democratic Party base tilts definitely leftward.

Party insiders are not very happy about an election where their leader deliberately positioned the platform to the right of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Mulcair acknowledges that mistake, saying it was his decision to play it safe, an electoral choice that turned out to be fatal.

He also says he has cleaned house. Some of his longest-serving allies have headed West to work for Premier Rachel Notley. That is hardly a demotion, but a recognition that those who have tasted the potential sweetness of power actually want to work in government.

Languishing for four more years in a rebuilding mode on the federal scene is certainly not as attractive as actually delivering policy today.

Mulcair has his own nemesis out in Alberta with former rival Brian Topp running the operation for Premier Notley and recruiting the castoffs from the good ship Mulcair.

They have a good three years to hone their governing skills in Alberta with the hope of coming back to be part of a winning national team in the next election.

Meanwhile, if Mulcair really wants to dig deep, he has to acknowledge a couple of flaws in his own post-election post mortem.

The leader put a tremendous amount of emphasis on his principled stand in favour of the niqab, pointing to insider polling that saw his party drop 20 points overnight. For sure the decision hurt, but the winning party also had the same position.

So reading too much into that call is not borne out by overall election results. Mulcair’s statements on the niqab were more pointed than those of Justin Trudeau. But his speaking style in general was more aggressive.

Trudeau ran a very positive campaign, while Mulcair admitted his lawyerly rational approach was not appreciated.

It goes deeper than that. And that is why the referendum question cannot be overlooked when New Democrats reflect on their choice for future leader. Mulcair was the architect of the Sherbrooke Declaration, which became his way of demonstrating to nationalist Quebecers that he was one of them. That is probably why they were so shocked to witness his support for multiculturalism by way of the niqab. They knew the Liberals were strong supporters of multiculturalism, so the Grit head-covering stance was expected.

But not so for Mulcair, who was supposed to be “one of them.” Nowhere was the nationalist streak more visible than when Mulcair attacked Trudeau’s father for his position on the War Measures Act.

The timing couldn’t have been worse, as it was the anniversary of Pierre Trudeau’s death, and Justin hit him right between the eyes on that, and on the number that Trudeau considered definitive for referendum purposes. Nine Supreme Court judges validated the Clarity Act and contradicted Mulcair.

Most anglophone Canadians who could remember supported Trudeau’s 1970 actions. By attacking him and by vowing to repeal the Clarity Act, Mulcair lost seats in Atlantic Canada and Ontario that otherwise might have survived the purge.

By refusing to reflect on the problem that he created with the Sherbrooke Declaration, Mulcair ignores a big factor in his defeat.

If it takes more than two-thirds of a party to affirm a leader, how can you not ask the same for a country?

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.