Dion enjoys no home-turf advantage in Quebec, polls show

By Hubert Bauch
Canwest News Service

Liberal party leader Stephane Dion has ranked as the least popular of the big four federal leaders among Quebec voters. (Jenelle Schneider/Vancouver Sun)

Quebecers have traditionally favoured their native sons in federal politics.

At least until now - until Stephane Dion.

In the past, all who rose to the leadership of parties with serious prospects of power became prime minister, thanks in large part to critical down-home support. The lineage runs unbroken from Wilfrid Laurier to Louis St. Laurent to Pierre Trudeau to Brian Mulroney to Jean Chretien.

But for the first time ever, a homeboy advantage isn't working for a federal leader in Quebec - and a Liberal leader at that.

"Historically, being from this province gets you a vote bump of between 10 and 15 per cent, and so far he's not been getting it," says Universite de Montreal electoral analyst, Bruce Hicks.

In the general run of polls for the past year, Dion has ranked as the least popular of the big four federal leaders among Quebec voters, and the last one they'd want as prime minister. Liberal support is mired near the 20 per cent vote they got in the province last election, which gave them 11 seats, a count they'd have to at least double to form a government.

Dion might be running for prime minister of the country, but he's no hero in his native Quebec City, where the Tories are close to 40 polling points up on the Liberals.

If he loses this election, Dion's grief will be compounded by dubious historical distinction. He would be the first Quebec-born Liberal leader who failed to become prime minister, and if, as the polling trend suggests, the Conservatives top the Liberal vote in the province this time, he'd be the first Quebec leader outstripped on home turf by an outlander -and one from Alberta, at that.

"If you'd told me 20 years ago this could happen, I would have fallen out of my chair," says a seasoned Quebec backroomer.

Informed observers suggest the cause of this unprecedented pass comes down to two factors: Call them the federalist thug factor and the nerdy professor factor. Together they have formed a negative image of Dion that has come to stick in the popular Quebec mindset.

Dion's aggressive role in bringing in tough new rules for Quebec referendums with the Clarity Act, and his merciless butchering of separatist sacred cows when he was national unity minister under Jean Chretien alienated even soft nationalists. It also got him a rude going-over by the francophone news media, the most extreme casting him as a traitor, and the most mischievous caricaturing him as a rat.

"There's a strong perception that he's a federalist hardliner who's firmly opposed to Quebec's traditional demands," said pollster Claude Gauthier of the authoritative CROP firm. "He has a reputation for coming down hard on Quebec."

At the same time, he's been widely lampooned as a bumbling political naif and derided for his professorial airs and convoluted articulation. "He has the somewhat absent air of a myopic professor," it was typically noted in a report on a Dion campaign event in Montreal last week. This persistent slagging has had a cumulative effect, suggests Christian Bourque of Leger Marketing, Quebec's other leading pollsters.

"He was made fun of so much by the francophone media that people formed an opinion of him that they now take for granted. It's not so much that people dislike him, so much as that they haven't come to respect him. What I see is a lack of respect for Mr. Dion that's taken for granted."

There's general agreement even among critics that Dion has undeniable qualities that should endear him to Quebecers: his manifest intelligence, sincerity and dedication to the public interest. His bold championing of the environmental cause should appeal to Quebecers, who like to think they're more environmentally enlightened than the rest.

The problem, analysts say, is that he has failed to articulate these in a way that connects with most Quebecers, particularly his fellow francophones who should, theoretically, understand him best.

Dion naturally speaks like an academic: Having had an academic for a father, been an academic himself for most of his adult life, and being married to an academic, he's therefore been slow to master the rhythms of political speech, said Hicks.

"Academics are given to run-on sentences with lots of commas. They like to explain and qualify everything. That's a problem in politics where the media like short, snappy quotes. It doesn't come naturally for him to boil things down to six-second clips."

For some, his academic erudition is irritating and smacks of condescension. "It's like he's saying, `I'm brilliant, I'm educated and I'll put all my great talent, education and culture to help you out, poor jerk,' " said a veteran Quebec spin doctor. "It's all the more remarkable, because he's perfectly sincere, but you tend to feel from his manner that he's talking down to you."

No one has caricatured Dion more cruelly than La Presse editorial cartoonist Serge Chapleau. He's stopped depicting Dion as a rodent and says he admires his intellect. "But at the same time, there's such a nerd there. He reminds you of the guy who was always first in class that we'd like to wait outside school for to punch him in the face."

Hicks said Dion's challenge in this campaign is to define his image where others have so far defined it for him, either as a Quebec-bashing federalist hardliner, or the vacillating fumbler, as Conservative attack ads depict him.

But time is running short for that, said Gauthier, noting he has a month to do what he hasn't managed in the last 20.

"An image can change, but it takes time," he said, citing Jean Chretien and Jean Charest as unpopular leaders who managed to grow in favour with their fellow Quebecers over time.

But for both, it took more than one election. Dion won't have that luxury.

For him, this election is a matter of now or never.