The March 26 Quebec elections and the Canadian elite’s turn to the right

It is common knowledge that the federal Conservatives—who have expanded the Canadian armed forces’ participation in a colonial-type counterinsurgency war in southern Afghanistan, vowed to expand the Canadian military to the point that the world’s major powers take notice, and aligned Canada even more closely with the Bush administration’s predatory global ambitions—view the re-election of Quebec’s Liberal government as pivotal to their own plans for winning a parliamentary majority in the next federal election.

The Liberal government of Jean Charest, which won a five-year mandate in April 2003, could have waited till spring 2008 to go to the polls. But after consultations with Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives, Quebec Premier Jean Charest decided to call early elections in hopes of taking advantage of a spurt in popular support as measured by the opinion polls and, thereby, delivering a major blow to their common Quebec indépendantistes political rivals, organized in the Parti Québecois (PQ) and, at the federal level, the Bloc Québecois (BQ).

In 2003 the Liberals ousted a nine-year-old PQ government by making vague and hypocritical appeals to popular anger over a dramatic deterioration in the quality of healthcare, education and other public services and by rallying the support of big business and the corporate media with promises to slash taxes on business and high-income earners, amend the labour code to facilitate the contracting out of work, and “scale back the size of the state.”

The Liberals’ right-wing agenda soon brought them into headlong conflict with the working class and for most of the past four years the Liberals and Charest have registered the lowest or among the lowest-ever popular support recorded for a sitting Quebec government and premier.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/queb-m06.shtml