Election Poster Critique, version québécoise

So I did finally manage to get all of my photos of the four more significant parties in the Québec election, to take place on Monday. I mostly went with the 'leader' posters (this is a rather disturbing tendency, considering we don't vote directly for the leaders, but for the representatives in our districts), with one little exception right off the top where the leader poster was completely different from the candidate posters for the same party. I even found (mostly) unadulterated versions. Here is my lovely critique of each of them, in alphabetical order by the name of the party in French.

Action Démocratique du Québec

First up is the leader poster, where they are trying to make it look like 'our pal' Mario has autographed it for us. This is really quite a vain one, and a big target for poster defacers. The version seen here has only the purple sticker added on the bottom, adapting to party slogan into a call for more support for education.

Here is the candidate version for this party. It's a funny thing, but for quite a long period when I looked at their posters, I read "Donnez-nous le pouvoir" (Give us the power) instead of "Donnez-vous le pouvoir" (Give yourself the power). Either way, it just gives me the creeps, but that is likely a larger analysis of this most right-wing party's ideas.

Parti Liberal du Québec

The thing that I have found amusing and yet disconcerting about this party's poster is their strange slogan: "L'économie d'abord OUI" (Economy first, YES). My disconcertion is not about putting the economy first, but about seeing a "OUI" on a red background. For us, with our politics often centred around the question of Québec nationalism, the OUI is usually on a blue background, so the red usurpation of the positive seems oddly out of place.

Their logo is just plain ugly.

And look, I didn't say anything about the crazy hair of the leader! (Oops!)

Parti Québécois


Now this one looks like some kind of religious iconography, with the light shining down on Sainte Pauline and illuminating her face in a quite flattering way. I certainly don't expect anyone to put an unflattering picture on an election poster, but the lighting is a bit over the top. I should add that she doesn't look one bit tired in this photo. ;-)

I continue to be puzzled by the change to the party logo. You can see the new one in the photo above and the old one here:

I get replacing the red tail of the Q with a green one — everyone wants to give the impression of being green these days. But I continue to be disconcerted by the change in orientation of the end of the tail of the Q: vertical in the new one, horizontal in the old one. What does this mean?

I am oddly drawn to the wacky little graphic element of the white circle echoed by the party logo, which is repeated on most of the formats of the candidate posters, but unfortunately not all. I think it is supposed to make us think of the circle on the ballot in which we must make our mark, but that just came to me now, weeks after first seeing it.

My other comment was: too many fonts on a single poster! I count at least three, and that is just too busy for me.

Québec Solidaire

Look! It's a two-headed party! Yes, there are co-leaders of the party and they even have separate sections on the party web site, which is fascinating. When they were not included in the debate, it was only Françoise David (on the left) who did a gruelling online debate participation with updates every couple of minutes as she responded live to the questions the other leaders were answering on network television. As you might gather from their name and this leadership configuration, this is the most left-wing party. While the poster is sort of 'designed' looking, it is quite utilitarian and betrays the fact that they probably don't have a ton of money for graphic designers or printing costs.
I even heard that some of their candidate posters are recycled from the last time around (we had elections only a year and a half ago — but that's a whole other story) with some stickers applied to freshen up the messaging.

Why no Parti Vert (Green Party)? Well, they're quite marginal in Québec politics, with several other parties incorporating green elements into their platforms. I saw a tiny poster for their local candidate last week, but didn't have my camera with me at the time. The poster seems to have disappeared since then.

Coalition OUI!

I went to one of the protests today regarding our big political crisis. The weather was lovely, but quite cool, and there was a brisk wind blowing, which made for lovely flapping flags carried by people in the crowd. I tried to take a couple of pictures of the crowd, but I was in the middle of it, so the panoramic shots just weren't there.

While the crowd was not huge, it was broad spectrum: pretty much all of the union centrals, student groups, artist groups, environmental groups, women's groups, and freelancers like myself and some friends I ran across in the crowd (plus Andrew who came with me).

I did manage to take a couple of photos of some of the more clever signs that people were carrying.

These two were quite fun: Darth Harper and Who's Sovereign Now?

What's especially funny about this one is the use of the Tory poster from the recent election campaign with their meaningless slogan (Québec is getting stronger). What has been added above can be translated as 'Get out the door' (more literally 'Take the Door'). The cutout Harper head, carried as a mask, is just a bonus.

Ah, but we are amused!

Here I was thinking that it is about time I get out there with my camera to record and then critique the new crop of posters from our Québec election, and then along came intrigue at the federal level!

Aren't these the people we just didn't vote for? Yes, indeed. The party that managed to capture over 46% of the seats with under 38% of the vote and then promised to be more collaborative this time around came out swinging in a most provocative way. This spurred the parties with the rest of the seats (except for that one independent) to cook up a delightful scheme to propose a coalition of themselves (actually of two of them with the external support of the third) to replace the government. Before we swing off into the land of denouncing the illegitimacy of all that, let's note that the two main partners in this coalition got more than 44% of the vote (yet under 37% of the seats). If you add in the third 'silent' partner, you get a total of 54.41% of the vote and 52.92% of the seats.

So how, exactly, is that anything less than democratic?

The government reacted rather quickly to try to remove all of the objectionable elements of its 'economic update' that had caused all the uproar in the first place. Hands off the political party financing, leaving the public employees' rights in place, speeding up the date of a budget…do you think they might have seen the error of their ways?

Not a chance. They are now back on the attack, and their biggest argument seems to be to vilify that 'silent partner' in the coalition, which just happens to have won close to two-thirds of the seats they contested. And I get to hear person on the street interviews from across the country echoing that vilification of our legitimate democratic choice in Québec. You might question the legitimacy of the party as part of your election strategy, but once we have made our choice, you have to respect it. That is the essence of democracy, whether you like it or not.

Now comes the fun stuff.

Several alternatives are in the offing:

1 - Things could go as the coalition partners planned, with a vote of non-confidence in the government and the Governor General asking the official opposition if it can form a government. The government has already managed to delay by a week the vote that should have taken place yesterday.

2 - The Prime Minister could ask the Governor General to prorogue Parliament, essentially saying 'Let's start all over again in a couple of months', which is an odd thing for a government that is less than two months old to do. We might still be in the same situation when they come back, unless the government has a change of attitude in the intervening period.

3 - The Governor General could react to either of these situations in a manner other than what those approaching her are asking. (That's where things get truly undemocratic, but we are still stuck with this last vestige of feudalism.) She could dissolve Parliament and order new elections, refuse to prorogue and offer the chance to the opposition to form a government …anything but order them beheaded, since we did away with that some time ago.

What is certain is that I will continue to get a little steamed that it seems acceptable for people out there — including the Prime Minister — to suggest that some electoral choices are more equal than others. My Member of Parliament, who happens to be the leader of the Bloc Québécois, got 50.2% of the vote in his (my) riding. Some of the members of the cabinet who got less than that: Rob Nicholson (Justice), Peter MacKay (Defence), Diane Finley (Human Resources and Skills Development), John Baird (Transport), Lawrence Cannon (Foreign Affairs), Josée Verner (Intergovernmental Affairs), Christian Paradis (Public Works), Leona Aglukkaq (Health), Lisa Raitt (Natural Resources), Gail Shea (Fisheries), and that's without moving into the more junior positions.

The other thing that is certain is that I will find the time this week to get in my post about the Québec election…