Today the BQ threw down the gauntlet – sort of. The Bloc Quebecois have issued 5 ‘non-negotiable’ demands that the Tories must meet in order to get BQ support.
This comes less than a week after the BQ saw the collapse of their vote in Quebec and two weeks after Stephane Dion’s ultimatum to the Tories.
Here are the BQ demands via Canadian Press:
1. the elimination of all federal spending powers in provincial jurisdictions
2. the Tory government to respect the Kyoto Protocol
3. the continuation of supply management in the agricultural sector.
4. promises to help Quebec’s forest industry
5. a clear commitment that Canadian soldiers will pull out of Afghanistan when the current mission ends in February 2009.
It looks bad. But I think it’s just looks [others disagree].
I suspect that four of those demands are window dressing for the big one – and that’s the restriction on federal spending power. If Duceppe puts that on the table as a non-negotiable pre-requisite for supporting the throne speech then he positions himself to take credit for it and to run on it when it passes.
The big Tory criticism of the Bloc in the last election was that they didn’t get anything done. This bluster of Duceppe is seemingly his attempt to pre-empt that claim in the next election.
What Duceppe saw in the recent provincial election was the failure of left-wing politics to win votes outside of Montreal. In the countryside and in the smaller cities, Tory ideas or rather ADQ ideas were ascendant. He may have thought it was a fluke, but the by-election had to have confirmed this to him.
Quebecois care about the environment and the war, but that won’t sway their vote. What gets votes are Tory promises like the ‘nation’ resolution and like the commitment to restrict the federal spending power. While this is a desperate move on Duceppe’s part, it’s not brinkmanship it’s positioning.
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One final note – I love the French language sometimes, it’s so clear. Here’s the title of the BQ demand that the Tories ‘end the mission’ in Afghanistan – in the original French : “Afghanistan : retrait en 2009″
