2024-02-21 05:00:00
OTTAWA | It was a matter of time before Yves-François Blanchet and the Conservatives dropped the gloves.
The leader of the Bloc has a sense of the formula. He can be quite incisive, even slobbery.
We know the sharp and excited tone of Pierre Poilievre, which rubs off more than ever on his Quebec deputies.
Add to that polls which show that the natural enemy of the Bloc has rarely been so threatening in Quebec. All the ingredients are there for fireworks between the two camps, who have been arguing like rotten fish in recent days on social networks.
This demonstrates one thing: the stakes in Quebec are high in view of the next election, both for the Bloc and for the Conservatives.
A springboard or a ceiling?
Pierre Poilievre is doing everything in his power to link the Bloc to the Trudeau years. He uses the same strategy outside Quebec with the NDP.
In the ROC, the strategy seems to work. The Conservatives are grabbing the Liberal vote, but also the New Democratic vote, as in northern Ontario.
Poilievre leads flatly in the regions and comes dangerously close to big cities and suburbs.
If elections took place tomorrow, it would be a blue conservative tidal wave… except in Quebec, which is still resisting.
Like other Canadians, Quebecers also seem ready for change, but the Conservative option remains uncertain for them.
Conservative support here has been around 23% or 24% for months now. This is certainly a solid foundation. It remains to be seen whether it will be a springboard or a ceiling.
Identify
Unlike his predecessors, Poilievre does not intend to promise new powers to Quebec.
To speak to the nationalists, he counts above all on his Montreal spouse and on her promise of a less interventionist government in areas of provincial jurisdiction.
A smaller federal government in line with its libertarian ideology.
It leaves the field open to the Bloc Québécois, so to speak, in terms of identity.
Yves-François Blanchet will recall Poilievre’s opposition to the Law on State Secularism whenever he can. That he is an outsider who understands nothing regarding Quebec identity.
The Bloc and Poilievre’s Conservatives present completely opposing visions of the role of the state.
For Poilievre, government bureaucracy is liberticidal and the cause of many problems.
Yves-François Blanchet embraces his social-democratic side, a legacy of the Quiet Revolution, as he said Tuesday morning on QUB radio.
The libertarian and populist conservatism that Poilievre proposes is a new beast for the Bloc Québécois to confront.
We understand better why tempers are so heated between the two camps.
1708506160
#battle #Quebec #begun
