BURST
QUEBEC — Quebec Conservatives are launching a campaign aimed at wooing anglophone voters in hopes of chipping away support from the Liberal party, which remains in the throes of a crisis that has dominated headlines for close to two weeks.
The ad campaign will appear in The Gazette, The Suburban and on social media with the tagline “No referendum. No corruption.”
The slogan references both the Parti Québécois plans for a third referendum and the corruption allegations facing the Quebec Liberal Party.
Earlier this week, the province’s anti-corruption unit, UPAC, confirmed it had begun interviewing people in connection with an alleged vote-buying scheme during the Liberal party’s leadership race, won by Pablo Rodriguez. The allegations surfaced last week, just one day after Rodriguez fired his parliamentary leader, Marwah Rizqy, after she had fired her chief of staff, Geneviève Hinse, without consulting him.
“I’m not happy,” Quebec Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime said of the scandal rocking the Liberals. “But it’s certainly an opportunity.”
Much of that opportunity lies in targeting the non-francophone vote.
A Pallas Data poll published Wednesday showed that while just 15 per cent of Quebec francophones intend to vote for the provincial Liberals, 60 per cent of non-francophones continue to support that party. That same poll showed 15 per cent support for Quebec Conservatives among francophones and 14 per cent support among non-francophones.
Though Conservatives failed to win a seat in the 2022 provincial election, the party nabbed almost 13 per cent of the vote. It made inroads in traditional Liberal ridings of Montreal, coming second behind the Liberals in the ridings of Jacques-Cartier (with 11 per cent of the vote), Robert-Baldwin (16 per cent) and D’Arcy-McGee (22 per cent).
“Democracy is sick in many of those constituencies” where Liberals dominate, Duhaime said. “The non-francophone community in Quebec has been hostage to the Quebec Liberal Party for way too long.
“They don’t have to hold their nose and keep voting for the Liberals.”
The party hopes to move beyond debates around sovereignty, Duhaime said.
Liberals “have an interest to keep us in that same old debate” to keep a “monopoly” over anglophone voters, he said.
Though once a sovereignist , Duhaime is now the leader of a federalist party he said presents a clear alternative to the Liberals.
“It’s always difficult for us not to laugh when the Liberals say they’re the party of the economy,” he said, when “they choose Justin Trudeau’s best man in Quebec to become their leader.”
Rodriguez was formerly Quebec lieutenant, as well as a minister, in Trudeau’s federal government.
Duhaime said his party supports natural gas exploitation in Quebec, quickly eliminating the deficit and increasing private-sector involvement in the health-care system.
“We’re really free market,” he said.
Quebec Conservatives hope to appeal to voters with conservative values, he said, “those who think it’s time to downsize the state, that the Quebec government is intervening way too much, that they’re paying too much tax.”
Duhaime said he supported the ban on public prayer, included in the secularism bill tabled Thursday . Praying on the street doesn’t “have anything to do with religious freedom,” he said. “I think it has everything to do with political provocation.”
The crisis facing the Liberals “is not good for the political class,” Duhaime said.
“It feeds the cynicism of the population. It puts us all in the same bag. It reminds us of everything we heard at the Charbonneau Commission,” which investigated corruption in Quebec’s construction sector.
Rodriguez rejected accusations of “corruption” within the Liberal party Thursday, accusing his opponents of playing a “political game.”
But Duhaime stood by the decision to use the word “corruption” in his ad.
“I could have written fling flang,” he said, referencing a slang term for “funny business” Rizqy had reportedly used in a conversation with Rodriguez.
“We’re going to let everyone investigate,” he said, “but it’s always the ethical problem that there is with the Liberals.”
Duhaime said he wanted voters to “realize there’s another option, without the suspicions of corruption, without the threat of a referendum.”
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