Report suggests that Harper Conservatives are set to woo Quebec voters

It appears that the Harper government is in the process of wooing Quebecers ahead of the 2015 election.

According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the strategy begins, in earnest, in early September with a pre-Parliament cabinet meeting in that province's capital city.

After winning 63 seats in the 1988 federal election, the Tories really haven't been able to gain any traction in la belle province.

There were a lot of factors in play, in many of those elections including the emergence of the Reform Party and Bloc Quebecois and, of course, the NDP's so-called 'Orange Crush' in 2011.

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With that aside, can the Conservatives win back the heart and minds of Quebecers? Do they really want or need to?

Yahoo Canada News spoke to political scientist Bruce Hicks — currently the Visiting Fellow at the School for Public & International Affairs at Glendon College — to get his thoughts on the matter.

Yahoo: Why haven't the Harper Conservatives been able to gain any traction in Quebec?

Bruce Hicks: The Harper Government, when it first came to power, invested time, government money and some specific policy & programme initiatives into wooing Quebec. That was because the Action démocratique du Québec had made inroads provincially as a right of centre party and the Conservative Party of Canada rightly concluded that they could tap into these same voters for some minor electoral successes during a federal election. This won them a few seats early on, primarily around the Quebec City region.

The challenge the Harper Government discovered is that Quebec is a left of centre province which is very ‘needy’ (all provinces are needy when it comes to money from the federal government but Quebec demands and has historically been able to obtain more per capita due to the high separatist sentiment in the province).

Quebec is also a province where issues like culture and the environment (not files the Conservatives are strong on) get media and public attention.

The cost of holding onto these Quebec seats must have been weighed against the gains they would make by taking a hardline with Quebec in more conservative pockets of Western Canada, because the government stopped making overtures to voters in Quebec and either ignored Quebec or took an anti-Quebec stance on a number of issues.

The fact that there was a PQ government in power in Quebec and that the federal electoral map was adding new seats to Ontario and the West appears to have also been a factor in their decision.

Yahoo: Do you think this new strategy will work?

Hicks: The decision by the Harper Government to hold a Cabinet meeting in Quebec City prior to the return of Parliament might be a reversal of the Conservative Party strategy of sacrificing Quebec seats in order to curry favour with conservative voters in the ‘rest of Canada’ and a return to wooing Quebec voters, especially around Quebec City, or it could simply be a public relations exercise to counter the now widely-held belief that it has sacrificed Quebec.

Ontario voters, particularly in urban areas (which will be a major battleground in the next election), are very sensitive to Quebec and historically have responded most to political parties that are seen to be nation building. So this might be more about winning seats in suburban Toronto, where a number of new ridings have been created, than about winning seats in Quebec.

Yahoo: What do they have to do to win more Quebec seats? Or is it a lost cause?

Hicks: There are conservative voters in Quebec and the Conservative Party of Canada can focus on them, like the ADQ did and the Coalition Avenir Québec have been doing. But to make major inroads into Quebec the Conservative Party has to be seen as a leader on issues that are not natural fits for them, like the environment.

With the leader of the Liberal Party (Justin Trudeau) and the NDP (Thomas Mulcair) both being from Quebec, and those parties being more natural ideological fits for progressive Quebec voters, it is hard to see how the Conservatives will make serious inroads into Quebec.

But, like I said, this meeting may be more about the optics for English Canada than it is about winning seats in Quebec.

(Photo courtesy of the Canadian Press)

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