PQ leader flip-flops on citizen-driven referendums

Enlarge Image

Bernard Drainville (THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Enlarge Image

Pauline Marois (THE CANADIAN PRESS)

MONTREAL -- The idea of citizen-driven referendums has inspired grassroots chatter within the Parti Québécois for years. It was a crisis of Pauline Marois' leadership, several months ago, that finally made it party policy.

Now the ticking "time bomb," in the words of one longtime party insider, has gone off just as Marois was strolling through a trouble-free election campaign.

The possible premier-in-waiting has performed a sudden about-face on the policy and now says, no, a PQ government would not be forced to hold a vote on independence whenever a few hundred thousand names were gathered on a petition.

Marois says the petition would simply be taken under advisement. Under the constitutional order, she says, parliamentarians must have the final say on such decisions.

The episode has left constitutional observers, political insiders and Marois' opponents weighing in on the possible implications on her bid for the premiership.

The PQ has raised, debated and, for a variety of reasons, rejected the idea of allowing citizens to petition for referendums before. Marois herself opposed the plan in 2008.

But amid a wave of discontent within the party last year, an ambitious young member of the PQ caucus took the opportunity to resurrect the moribund idea.

Marois had headed into last summer's legislative recess with her leadership critically weakened by a string of caucus defections. A coup was rumoured to be afoot.

Before dispatching her caucus back to their ridings, she instructed them to return to Quebec City in the fall with some fresh ideas to revive the party's fortunes.

Bernard Drainville, a former Radio-Canada journalist, took Marois at her word and drew up 10 proposals he said would take the party out of its "bubble" and better connect with citizens.

The proposals included allowing citizen-initiated referendums, of the sort seen in numerous jurisdictions from California to Switzerland. But rather than simply hand his suggestions to Marois, Drainville took the unusual step of making them public.

The move was interpreted as a direct challenge to Marois' leadership.

Considered a likely contender in any future PQ leadership race, Drainville even gave a round of interviews in which he took thinly disguised jabs at his leader.

"If the Parti Québécois doesn't bring itself closer to the people, we won't get through this," he said, referring to the party's low polling numbers at the time.

Drainville tabled the idea again at a PQ convention early this year. This time, Marois was fighting off a potential challenge from former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe.

In a party whose grassroots constantly clamours for measures that might bring Quebec closer to independence, the idea of referendums-on-demand was a surefire crowd-pleaser.

So Marois, grudgingly, went along.

Then somehow, in the following months, the issue grew dormant. It had hardly come up during the current election campaign, drawing to its close next week. That changed this past week when Franßois Legault started picking away at the issue. Marois' rival, the leader of the Coalition party and her one-time cabinet colleague, pressed her on the issue during televised debates.

Her replies to Legault prompted journalists to grill her on the issue at a news conference after the debate, on Wednesday night, and again on Thursday.

The barrage of questions so frustrated PQ partisans at one campaign stop Thursday they started heckling reporters.

A visibly annoyed Marois did clarify her position on the petitions.

If 15 per cent of Quebec's population, or just over 850,000 people, signed a petition the public could essentially ask elected politicians to consider holding a plebiscite, she explained.

"It would force a government to reflect deeply," Marois said. "Ultimately, it's up to the national assembly to decide when there will be a referendum."

Now analysts, political rivals, and voters are weighing the fallout.

One political scholar expressed bafflement the PQ would ever have considered the idea.

"Citizen-initiated referendums are not very compatible with a British-inspired parliamentary system," said Antonin-Xavier Fournier, a professor of politics at a junior college in Sherbrooke, Que. "Citizens themselves can't oblige Parliament and the Crown to adopt a law. It's what we call 'the supremacy of Parliament.' "

This, said Fournier, is hardly top-secret information.

"This is constitutional law 101," he said. "Students of constitutional law in university and CEGEP learn these elementary notions of the supremacy of Parliament."

Drainville acknowledged this point in interviews Thursday. He told Radio-Canada that the moral weight of 850,000 signatures would bring political pressure on governments to respond, even if they are not legally bound to do so.

What it would also do, he said, is make democracy more relevant to citizens again.

"I believe in this idea that, between elections, we should allow citizens to make themselves heard and to tell a government that isn't listening, 'Hey, listen to us,"' Drainville said.

-- The Canadian Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 25, 2012 A22