Pardon My French

We have a problem.

The Quebec press is already making noise about Peter MacKay’s weak French. It is immediately a big issue in Quebec. He has been in public life forever, they say. Why has he never made the effort to learn French?

He took no questions after his kickoff announcement. Perhaps to avoid any questions in French. He cannot do that for long.

This seems to me a fatal flaw. Never mind losing any competitiveness in Quebec. It matters almost as much in Ontario, because Ontario considers itself profoundly vested in preserving Canadian unity.

At this point, MacKay’s only credible opponent is Erin O’Toole. Erin O’Toole’s French is apparently not much better.

So it is not just that the Tories are going to end up with a unilingual leader; there will not even be a prominent candidate who speaks good French. At best, Quebec is likely to tune out. At worst, it begins to look as though they don’t think about Quebec, have no sense of Quebec. Quebec tends to nurse grievances over this sort of thing that can last for many years.

What an epic disaster it turns out to have been that the Conservatives did not choose Max Bernier last time. He was their most prominent Quebec politician. At the time, he was running on a libertarian platform, economic conservatism with social liberalism, which might have overcome the current party divisions.

Sorry to repeat myself, but the best hope for the Conservatives now is the second coming of Stephen Harper.

Failing that, the best hope for small-c conservatives may be Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party. He has more natural support in Quebec, being both bilingual and a native son, and to top that, as a libertarian Tory, he has more natural support in the West than MacKay as well.

The official Tories may soon be reduced to what they were the last time MacKay was leader.