Anthony Koch: The CAQ has turned into a cheap Liberal party knockoff

MONTREAL — The Coalition Avenir Québec was founded because a huge number of Quebecers wanted something neither the Parti Québécois nor the Quebec Liberals could give them.

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They were nationalists, but they did not want another referendum. They wanted to protect French, defend Quebec’s identity and autonomy, and elect a government willing to stand up to Ottawa.

At the same time, many were economically conservative. They were tired of an oversized state, suffocating bureaucracy, and governments that seemed to believe every problem could be solved with another program, another regulation, or more intervention in the market. The merger with the conservative Action démocratique du Québec gave that part of the coalition a political home.

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That was the CAQ bargain: nationalism without a referendum. Centre-right economics without the Liberals.

And it worked! Spectacularly!

The CAQ shattered the old Liberal-PQ duopoly and delivered François Legault two consecutive majority governments.

Then, somewhere along the way, the CAQ stopped being the CAQ. This election completed their transformation.

The CAQ has effectively become the francophone wing of the Quebec Liberal Party.

Let’s start with the economy. What is actually left of the original CAQ proposition?

The party that promised to shake up the establishment became the establishment. The party that absorbed the ADQ tradition became the defender of a massive, expensive, interventionist state. Talk of fiscal discipline, reform and efficiency ended up just resulting in another round of record spending, bureaucratic expansion, and an even more bloated administrative state.

Put simply, the CAQ did not reform the “Quebec model,” it ended up completely surrendering to it.

What about nationalism?

The political genius of the CAQ was understanding that Quebec contained an enormous nationalist electorate that did not necessarily want independence. These voters wanted to defend French, Quebec identity and provincial autonomy without dragging the province back into another referendum.

That distinction was the entire point. Now it has almost disappeared. In this campaign, the CAQ has increasingly reduced itself to being the safe, managerial, anti-referendum alternative to the Parti Québécois.

Sound familiar?

It should, because that was the historic role of the Quebec Liberal Party.

A party created to escape the old Liberal-Péquiste divide has somehow managed to recreate it, except this time with itself playing a worse version of the Liberals. The PQ has reoccupied the nationalist pole while the CAQ has reduced itself to occupying the francophone territory of the federalist status quo.

It morphed into the very thing it was created to replace.

This has created an existential problem: its voters have somewhere else to go.

Nationalists are returning to the PQ.

Economic conservatives and former ADQ voters have turned to the Quebec Conservative Party.

Centrists and federalists who simply want the traditional anti-PQ option are going back to the actual Liberals.

So who, exactly, is the natural CAQ voter anymore?

That is why the party’s collapse cannot simply be dismissed as ordinary voter fatigue after eight years in government.

The CAQ once occupied an enormous and distinctive political space: too nationalist for the Liberals, too hostile to another referendum for the PQ, and more economically conservative than either.

One by one, it abandoned those distinctions. They’ve had the worst deficits in Quebec history, wasted billions on failed investments in companies like NorthVolt and government initiatives like the botched online rollout for the province’s auto insurer, SAAQclic, and they’ve also restarted a fast-tracked immigration program, and support higher immigration levels than the PQ.

And now, in this campaign, it has retreated to the oldest argument in Quebec politics: Vote for us because the alternative is the PQ. That was never supposed to be the CAQ. That’s the offering of the Liberal Party.

The coalition that built the CAQ is therefore breaking apart and returning to more natural political homes: nationalists to the PQ, the right to the Conservatives, and some centrists and federalists to the Liberals.

The CAQ was created as a nationalist, centre-right insurgency against Quebec’s tired political, but it has now devolved into little more than the francophone wing of the Liberals, which no one in Quebec ever wanted.

National Post

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