"Don't abuse the population, don't abuse the opposition parties, with your attitude," Jean-Pierre Charbonneau urges François Legault.
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QUEBEC — Without electoral reform, Quebec is just a “soft autocracy” and Premier François Legault‘s recent meetings with opposition party leaders represent a mere smokescreen, a former National Assembly president says.
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In holding talks with opposition leaders last week, Legault tried make Quebecers forget about his 2018 pledge to reform the province’s first-past-the-post electoral system, Mouvement Démocratie Nouvelle president Jean-Pierre Charbonneau said.
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“This cannot be an alternative, a second-best solution” in place of voting reform, Charbonneau, a former Parti Québécois minister and former president of the National Assembly from 1996 to 2002, said in a telephone interview with Presse Canadienne.
Mouvement Démocratie Nouvelle, the association that Charbonneau heads, has been campaigning for electoral reform since its creation in 1999.
“I say to the premier: Don’t abuse the population, don’t abuse the opposition parties, with your attitude,” Charbonneau added.
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Quebec’s current first-past-the-post system leads to distortions that are accentuated as the province moves from the traditional two-party dominance to a multi-party model.
Despite capturing 41 per cent of the vote in last October’s election, Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec won 72 per cent of the seats, or 90 out of 125. This distortion was denounced by both Mouvement Démocratie Nouvelle and pro-reform parties such as the PQ and Québec solidaire.
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“This case is shocking,” Charbonneau said.
“Soft autocracy is not what we want in Quebec. We want a real representative democracy, not a quiet autocracy.”
According to Charbonneau, the concentration of power in the hands of the premier is even worse than at the federal level or in the U.K., from which the Quebec model is derived.
“We are in a kind of drift,” Charbonneau said. “It’s really an elective monarchy. So it works around the premier in a way that is a bit excessive.”
By meeting with Quebec Conservative Party leader Éric Duhaime, whose party has no seats in the National Assembly even though it collected more than 530,000 votes, Legault himself is demonstrating that the system doesn’t work, said Charbonneau.
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“This is completely twisted,” said Charbonneau, who feels Duhaime should have an office at the National Assembly. In a normal political system, the National Assembly is where a government leader should be talking to his opposition counterparts, the Mouvement Démocratie Nouvelle head says.
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What Charbonneau is asking for is consistency: If one is prepared to listen to the opposition parties, one must also be prepared to listen to their demands for voting reform.
Since Legault is still at the start of his mandate, it’s not too late to introduce a bill to reform the voting system in time for 2026 elections, Charbonneau said.
In 2018, as a member of the opposition, Legault pledged to introduce a bill to reform the voting system if he took power by adding a proportional representation component based on the percentage of votes obtained. The CAQ government did introduce Bill 39 on electoral reform, but did not adopt it.
On the campaign trail, Legault said no one was fighting on the buses for electoral reform, suggesting it was a fad of intellectuals.
Charbonneau disagrees.
“People don’t fight on buses, regardless of the issue,” he said. “There’s not much to fight about on the buses, but that doesn’t mean people don’t have convictions and opinions.”
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January 23, 2023 at 02:53AM
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