It’s hard to know who came up with the idea of one-on-one clashes in Wednesday night’s French-language debate, but it brought the dire spectacle of Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan reading contorted, confusing statements at each other. If it sent a message, it was this: We don’t speak French.
Somehow, the struggles of those two in French didn’t make the two major contenders, Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole, look more fluent. The two former ministers could get a point across mostly, and communicate, but struggling with grammar and syntax and enunciating words that made face muscles move in unfamiliar ways.
In the leadership race it probably didn’t make much difference – organization is what counts most, anyway, and there wasn’t a momentum-changer. Perhaps it will aid Mr. MacKay, whose ability in French has been widely ridiculed, because Mr. O’Toole wasn’t appreciably better.
The important thing, for the Conservative Party as a whole, was to ensure that francophones didn’t tune into the party’s French-language leadership debate and feel like they were watching extraterrestrials. After this performance, they might well come away feeling they saw aliens still struggling to communicate.
There was a lot of reading. Ms. Lewis, a lawyer from Toronto, plainly couldn’t participate without reading verbatim from notes. The remarkable thing was that although party officials said the candidates had only been informed of the debate themes, she and the other candidates had texts ready for several questions. Not always the right one: Ms. Lewis was asked a question about the environment, and read an answer about deficits.
Amid it all, an image came to mind of outgoing Leader Andrew Scheer, sputtering to dodge questions about his views on abortion in last fall’s first French-language election debate – not just because he was asked a question he didn’t want, but because he was unable to talk his way through it in his second language.
There were a few clashes in this debate. Both Mr. O’Toole and Mr. MacKay managed. But this debate was slo-pitch, and neither is as articulate as Mr. Scheer in French.
It’s a problem that the Tories have a leadership race where the French-language debate wasn’t up to standard.
What should be considered worse by Conservatives is it symbolizes the failure to reach out and connect to Quebeckers who could well be the party’s voters.
The party’s own base in Quebec is small, but it is there, dug in, largely around Quebec City. In provincial politics, Quebec Premier François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec won a landslide in 2018. That’s a centre-right party, though a different one from the federal Conservatives. And the CAQ didn’t just win in Quebec City but in small towns and suburbs all over the province.
The CAQ’s conservatism is different. There is very little social conservatism, of the kind represented by Ms. Lewis and Mr. Sloan, in Quebec politics. Mr. Legault is pro-business, and likes the idea of cutting taxes, but he’s not a classic fiscal conservative out to shrink government, either.
Some prominent Quebec Conservatives still think there are a lot of potential Tory voters there. Richmond-Arthabaska MP Alain Rayes, one of the most influential Quebeckers in the party, referred to them in an interview back in February as “cultural conservatives” – rooted in a place, traditional, likely to live in small towns or rural regions rather than Montreal. In some ways, like the people in small towns who elected Mr. Harper three times.
The trick is that cultural conservatism is more likely to be rooted in a place – and small-town Quebec is different from small-town Alberta. Mr. Legault’s Bill 21, banning some public servants from wearing religious symbols, is anathema in the 905 suburbs that Conservatives need to win to win elections. The Bloc Québécois won a lot of Quebec’s small towns in 2019.
But it’s a lot harder to cross a cultural divide when you can’t communicate with people in ways that make them feel you see things the way they do. Or watch the same TV show, or get the same joke – or even that you might have.
Mr. O’Toole, for his part, started the debate with a promise that his French will get better. Mr. MacKay has been promising that all along. But in the first test, they fell short. The consolation is that the large pool of potential Quebec voters probably didn’t tune in to a debate likely to alienate the target audience.
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Campbell Clark