As Quebec's election campaign continues its eye-glazing amble toward its Dec. 8 election day, there's reason for all Canadians to be nervous about its seemingly inevitable outcome.

Deadly boring though each hour on the hustings may be to watch, the death rattle coming from Mario Dumont's Action Démocratique du Québec should cause widening eyes both inside and outside the province.

One reason is simple political arithmetic. As veteran columnist William Johnson astutely argued years ago, Quebec's traditional two-party system guarantees that, when the political wheel turns, the sovereigntist Parti Québécois will again become the government at some point.

Even a one-party monoculture like Alberta, after all, changes at least the names of its governing parties every 35 years or so. Montreal, as all who've visited will know, generally tends to be somewhat more democratically volatile than, say, Edmonton or Mundare.

Knowing that time and tide is on its side, the PQ has learned well how to soft soap its separatist message in lean years and ramp up referendum frenzy when sheer tedium leads to the Liberals being tossed from office.

Promising right move

The ADQ, in its upstart early stages, promised to be a third-party counterweight to that socially and economically damaging cycle. Mario Dumont, despite being barely old enough to shave when he became a notable player in the constitutional calamities of the early 1990s, once showed shrewd ability to challenge both the Liberals and the PQ on their traditional grounds. He offered the promise of an alternative to the interminable old sovereigntist-federalist arguments, and the prospect that Quebec voters would have real choice in their political lives.

Shrewd has turned to shreds, which is all the political credibility Dumont seems to have left. Talk was once heard in serious circles about the advent of an ADQ government. That has stopped cold as the party polls around 14 per cent.

Canadians outside Quebec who think they have no interest in the lemming march of young Monsieur Dumont and his party need to think again. If current polling numbers hold, Premier Jean Charest and his Liberals will be returned with a weak minority government once again. PQ Leader Pauline Marois must be licking her lips at the possibility that her turn in power is coming nearer.

There's no wheel like an old wheel, and Marois has been waiting her turn since the 1970s to lead the PQ back to power and then lead Quebec out of Canada. True, she has downplayed sovereigntist talk in this campaign and, indeed, since taking over the PQ a year ago. But she's also the politician who recently proposed bestowing full Quebec "citizenship" only on those whose French meets government-mandated standards of fluency. All others, apparently, would be deemed half or quarter "citizens" depending on the perfection of their pluperfect. Make no mistake, Marois is a true believer in all that the dream of Quebec's independence from Canada entails.

As for the argument that nobody in Quebec wants to talk sovereignty or referendums anymore, well, polls showed 70 per cent of the population didn't want Charest to call the current provincial election, either. We're having one anyway. The ADQ's demise and a return to two-party ways will certainly bring old debates back whether we like it or not.

Socialist reality

If that's bad news for the rest of Canada, it's even worse news for those of us in Quebec. The PQ's real damaging effect is not the threat of sovereignty. It is the reality of socialism. Decades of debate about independence left little intellectual air for growth of political alternatives to the crippling socialist mentality that pervades the province. The awful results of that are evident everywhere:

• Thanks to the omnipresent power of Quebec's unions, Montreal is a major Canadian city with streets and highways that would embarrass many Third World countries.
• Thanks to dogmatic faith in exclusively socialized medical care, the health system is actually a danger to citizens' lives. Heart patients in one Montreal suburb, for example, are waiting up to 18 months for simple diagnostic tests. Finding a family doctor here verges on the impossible. Indeed, just before the election campaign was called, my wife got a phone call from a clinic with the delightful news that we will have to wait only one more year — we've already waited eight years — for a GP.
• Thanks to the fantasies of socialist-inspired teachers' unions, the education system in the province is as much of a basket case as the health-care system. One school I drive by every morning has dropout rates in the 90 per cent range. A 50 per cent dropout rate is not uncommon across Quebec. Marois may want citizens with impeccable French, but the province's schools are having a hard time just producing high school graduates.

None of these, or the myriad other problems afflicted on Quebecers by air-borne socialism, is being seriously addressed in the current campaign. Why? Because with the ADQ's elimination as a source of third-party intellectual energy and political challenge, the old-line parties know the wheel will revolve and their party will be in power eventually.

It's back to the future for them, and time for the rest of us to be nervous all over again.