>>REVIEW
FRENCH KISS: STEPHEN HARPER’S BLIND DATE WITH QUEBEC
Chantal Hebert
Knopf Canada, 288 pp.
In the lead-up to the last federal election, most political analysts expected the fallout from the sponsorship scandal and the Gomery Inquiry would sink the Liberal Party in Quebec. Many expected that the Bloc Québécois would sweep the province, with the NDP picking up a couple of seats here and there. Very few suggested out loud that the Conservative Party, dominated by Western Canadian interests and harbouring a history of antagonism to Quebecois "special interests," would take as many as 10 seats.
Chantal Hebert’s French Kiss: Stephen Harper’s Blind Date With Quebec is the story of how Harper’s Conservatives successfully gained those 10 seats in a province they had been virtually shut out of for 10 years and in so doing, won the election. It’s the story of a loose conservative alliance forged under Brian Mulroney that, fractured under the twin stresses of economics and separatism in the 1990s, found itself edging back together. It is also the story of the failure of the national Liberal dream stretching back to Pierre Trudeau.
In one sense, Hebert, who writes for the Toronto Star and Le Devoir, as well as appearing frequently on CBC’s The National, argues that Harper’s government could mark the beginning of a new era in Canadian society. French Kiss also provides a brief overview of post-1980 referendum French-English relations, as well as the background issues that are once again emerging now that Quebec sovereignty is receding.
Hebert is right to focus on Quebec as the fulcrum on the next federal election, and to some degree, she spells out the stances and positions that the Harper government would need to take to maintain its support in La Belle Province. It is unfortunate that Hebert does not assess the degree to which the Conservatives could hold those positions. We are finding out that recent policies on climate change are causing Conservative support to plummet in Quebec. Similarly, Hebert’s focus is on the Conservatives, and while she does write at great length about the movements inside the Bloc Québécois and Liberal Parties that enabled them to lose so much ground to the Conservatives, she does not give much suggestion in her conclusion as to what circumstances would enable these parties to launch a comeback.
With the current decline in support for the Harper government, the recent public gaffes over climate change and the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, it is increasingly hard to imagine that Harper will get the chance to launch the era that Hebert describes. |
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