Quebec Liberal leader Dominique Anglade is trying to play down the appearance of the second party in the space of a week that seeks to woo English-speakers, a clientele that traditionally lines up behind the Liberals.
Colin Standish, a legal expert associated with a Sherbrooke law firm, announced Tuesday his intention to create the Parti canadien du Québec, with the avowed intention of attracting English-speaking voters dissatisfied with the Liberals' positions, especially when it comes to language laws.
Another initiative aimed at pillaging the Liberals' English-speaking following came into being last week when a defeated candidate for Montreal mayor, Balamara Holness, announced the creation of Mouvement Québec, whose message is also focused on the opposition to Bill 96 and Bill 21, the secularism law.
At the end of a conference before the Council of International Relations of Montreal on Tuesday, Anglade first tried to sum up these parties as part of the wave of rejection of longstanding parties as voters experiment with new options.
But then she said she was "very confident that people will see that the alternative is the Liberal Party of Quebec."
"Whether it is in the positions we have taken on Bill 21, whether it is the position we take on Bill 96, I think that the English-speaking community will identify very well with what is on the table," she said.
According to Anglade, the Liberals are the only "relevant offer" and the only "credible alternative" to François Legault's Coalition Avenir Québec.
For his part, Legault said he believed that "these people want a bilingual Quebec, and I believe that if we want French to still have its place in 50 and 100 years from now, we must have Bill 96, Bill 101 and we need immigrants to attend French schools."
The premier added that language-law opponents who are dissatisfied with the dissent offered by the Liberal Party "must understand that if Quebec is bilingual, unfortunately, the attractiveness of English in North America will be so strong that it's only a matter of time before we stop speaking French and Quebec becomes like Louisiana."
Parti Quebecois MNA Pascal Bérubé, meanwhile, said he sees in this political turmoil "the same old discourse" that's been repeating since 1977.
"Anglophones from Quebec come to the National Assembly and say that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are at the National Assembly," he said.
He took the opportunity to advise Anglade to "learn to live with it."
Recalling that the PQ was also repeatedly confronted with the emergence of sovereigntist political options, "now it happens on the Liberal side," he said.
"It's one more choice for anglophones, so I think it's more of a question for the Liberal Party, and for sure they are more concerned about that than us," he added.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on April 26, 2022.
