A rchive Date
[ 31-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[PQ strategist says it's game over
Time to negotiate a deal with Canada, says former aide to Parizeau, Bouchard
By MICHEL C. AUGER
Toronto Sun
February 18, 2000
MONTREAL - He's the best speechwriter Quebec politics has known, but that accolade has always been a bit too obscure for him. Jean-Francois Lisee would much rather be known as a political strategist.
He was a talented journalist, a correspondent in Paris and Washington who wrote an award-winning book on Quebec-U.S. relations. He then turned his attention to Quebec politics and his chronicle of the negotiations leading to the Charlottetown accord was a stinging attack on former Liberal premier Robert Bourassa called The Cheater.
Lisee then left journalism to enter politics and was the surprise of Jacques Parizeau's inaugural news conference as Parti Quebecois premier in 1994. Lisee was to be in charge of referendum strategy as well as writing Parizeau's speeches.
His achievements as a strategist were not all successful. He was the architect of the regional commissions that toured Quebec in the winter and spring of 1995 in order to officially, study the Draft Bill on Sovereignty. They were expected to drum up support for sovereignty, which was then in the low 40s in most polls, way too low even to think a referendum victory was possible.
The aim was to recreate the sovereignist fever that had swept Quebec a few years earlier, during the hearings of the Belanger-Campeau Commission. The touring regional commissions were a popular success. But people came to ask the wrong question.
Lisee and other PQ strategists thought Quebecers would ask about the fine details of Quebec's accession to sovereignty. They had prepared everything to reassure them, including the use of the Canadian dollar and the possibility of keeping Canadian citizenship. Much to their surprise, they came to ask why Quebec should become sovereign. They asked for "un projet de societe," a sort of blueprint of what a sovereign Quebec would be, which Lisee was promptly dispatched to write.
But the commissions also insisted on closer links with Canada, something Lisee and Parizeau had not foreseen. It was left to Lucien Bouchard to impose a new strategy and an offer of partnership with Canada that, in the end, nearly won the day for sovereignists in the 1995 referendum.
COULDN'T WIN
Lisee then became one of the few people to stay on in the premier's office when Bouchard replaced Parizeau in 1996. He resigned late last year, convinced a new referendum on sovereignty was not in the works and could not be won.
In a book published last week, Lisee makes a quite eloquent and lucid appraisal of Quebec politics four years after the referendum. Sovereignists may have been 50,000 votes away from winning on the night of Oct. 30, 1995, but this is a high-water mark that is not about to be broken.
Fact is, Lisee now believes it's time for the Parti Quebecois to move away from thoughts of sovereignty and seek a mandate for broad new powers for Quebec - and then go negotiate constitutional reform on that basis with Canada.
All this is made possible by the August, 1998 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada making constitutional negotiations compulsory after a referendum in any province. But the court only makes the negotiations compulsory and there is, of course, no guarantee of the outcome.
FLAWED STRATEGY
And that's the flaw in Lisee's new strategy. Every time Quebec sent a sovereignist to negotiate renewal of the federation, the outcome was a disaster from Quebec's point of view. Even when there is a common front of the provinces opposing Ottawa's plans, in the end, when forced to choose between a plan they don't like from the federal government and siding with the separatist government of Quebec, the choice is always easy.
From Rene Levesque during the patriation talks in 1981 to Lucien Bouchard in the social union talks last year, Quebec always ended up with the short end of the stick when it sent a sovereignist to negotiate in Ottawa.
Not surprisingly, the Bouchard government has tried almost everything to show its displeasure at what Lisee is proposing.
But if his proposals and his strategy are risky and controversial, his diagnosis on the state of the sovereignty movement is quite lucid.
Bouchard may be able to avoid a debate on the future of the sovereignty movement at the PQ's next convention, in May, but that debate cannot be avoided forever. If a former adviser to both Parizeau and Bouchard now says waiting for "winning conditions" is illusory, it would be surprising if other PQ militants did not start asking questions.
Michael Auger, political columnist for Le Journal de Montreal and Le Journal de Quebec, appears Fridays.
His e-mail address is: mcauger@journalmtl.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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