Inside Politics

There's something about Justin...

by Janyce McGregor Posted: February 15, 2012 10:28 AM Last Updated: February 15, 2012 10:40 AM

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(Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

Even the hint of Justin Trudeau - Justin Trudeau! - flirting with sovereignty was just too tempting for Quebec bloggers, then mainstream media, to walk away from.

Never mind that the notion of Pierre's son changing teams wasn't rooted in any sort of factual basis even before his defensive tweet and almost-melodramatic rant in the foyer of the House of Commons after question period on Tuesday.

His federalist bloodlines - on both sides - as well as his own track record as a political actor should have been enough to dismiss the early headlines as nationalist muckracking.

So why the protracted parsing of a few selected words on his part?

The few phrases in question come three-quarters of the way through a feature (and I do mean feature - it starts with music from the movie Rocky) interview last Sunday on the Radio-Canada radio program Dessine-moi un dimanche hosted by Franco Nuovo.

The context for his much-discussed musing that "maybe" he would want Quebec to be a country if his country, Canada, no longer reflected the values he believed in, comes near the end of the discussion.

First listeners hear how his training is going for his upcoming charity boxing match against Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau. (A media producer's dream, if there ever was one. Let's hope it raises a lot of money in the process.)

Stepping out of that ring then and back into his regular playing field, he talks about his efforts to engage young people in politics generally and the Liberal Party in particular, the challenge of winning his Montreal riding back from the Bloc Québécois, and the Liberal leadership race and his non-joining of it. All breezy and earnest stuff we've mostly heard before in various incarnations.

Then in the last three minutes of the 16-minute interview he delves from there into his own personal political values. Which is how he came to talking about Quebec's values, and how the partisan critique of Stephen Harper's Canada kicked in. 

Trudeau doesn't think Quebec, or specifically the values he perceives as characteristic of most Quebecers, is reflected enough in Harper's vision of Canada. (Indeed, the Conservatives were reduced to five seats in the province on May 2, so there's not a lot of representation available in caucus or cabinet.) He doesn't want Canada to move more toward small-c conservative values. No shock there.

And so to a translation of the quote itself:

"And it is not necessarily that Canadians don't have the same values as Quebecers. There is a way of seeing social responsibility, openness to others and cultural pride that is necessary for Canada, and it makes me enormously sad. And I always say that if I believed Canada was really Stephen Harper's Canada... that we were heading against abortion, against gay marriage, that we were going backwards ten thousand different ways... maybe I would think about wanting to make Quebec a country."
 
The crux of the excitement hangs on his use of "if" and "maybe" - and no doubt there's been a cautionary lesson learned about speaking in hypotheticals in the aftermath of the kerfuffle.
 
But is what he said really that far outside a very fashionable theme in Quebec politics today?
 
I was immediately reminded of something Jean Charest's justice minister, Jean-Marc Fournier, said after an acrimonious meeting last November with Harper's justice minister, Rob Nicholson, over the omnibus crime legislation.
 
"I don't recognize myself in this Canada," Fournier said, laying out the ways he felt the crime and rehabilitation measures in C-10 didn't reflect the things Quebecers valued about their (often successful) approach to crime, particularly with young offenders.
 
No Conservatives or media fearmongers manned the federalist barricades over that one. And indeed, Opposition MPs from Quebec made the same point in various ways, without triggering any national unity crisis. It was merely a fashionable talking point for attacking Harper's Conservatives.
 
The same theme also lives in arguments from the other side of the sovereignty street, where it's an even more comfortable fit. Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois recently told a party gathering that Steven Harper's federal Conservatives are leading the rest of Canada so far away from some of Quebec's social values that the only way to protect them is to leave the federation.
 
It's a predictable attack, perhaps. But also a strategic one in a province where the entire game's in disarray, and a new somewhat ambiguous/big tent party (that as of Tuesday still doesn't have official status at the National Assembly) is rocketing up opinion polls ahead of a provincial election (even if the writ doesn't drop this spring.)
 
To make matters more complicated, a provincial Conservative party has been revived, to steal votes from Charest's base and/or the upstart CAQ in what's likely to be a fascinating race. The exact nature of the cooperation between federal and provincial wings is unclear, but that won't matter once the branding begins in the stockyards of public opinion.
 
Whether you're running against federal or provincial Conservatives, values arguments have always been potent political attacks in Quebec. Remember the unexpectedly-difficult fight the Tories picked with Quebec cultural organizations in the 2008 election? "Us versus them" works at Quebec polling stations. That's why the parties reach for it.
 
And the Tories give as good as they get. Conservatives are not afraid to make values arguments work for them on any number of files. From 2005's "Stand up for Canada" message on through to present-day campaigns against child predators, Harper-generated communications strategies are laden with emotional appeals to voters' values.
 
Trudeau may have been going over the top to get attention and prove a point, as he suggested to Evan Solomon on Power&Politics. (He also suggested that his generation of Quebecer is less hung up on the sovereigntist "bogeyman" and views old referendum quarrels and federalist-sovereigntist labels differently, a sociology thesis in and of itself that may be difficult for older, battle-hardened generations of Quebec political analysts to accept.)
 
But the general idea of what he was saying, that Harper government policies - current or imagined, for the future - don't represent his values or what he sees as the dominant values in the province he represents, is hardly new.
 
"Quotes come and go," said his party leader Bob Rae on Tuesday.

Tags: Quebec, sovereignty, theressomethingaboutjustin, Trudeau