MONTREAL — For an indication of Quebec’s importance for the Liberals in the impending federal election, look no further than Steven Guilbeault.

If you are reading these words outside the province, you’ll likely have the impression that the heritage minister has spent the last five-or-so months gunning for your fundamental rights. Bill C-10, the Liberal government’s legislative attempt to force YouTube, Netflix and other Big Tech platforms into the embrace of the CRTC, the country’s broadcast regulator, was an “assault on freedom of speech,” according to former CRTC vice-chair Peter Menzies. 

Many academics said the proposed law would see CanCon quotas and constraints applied to citizens’ YouTube output. Columnists saw it as part of the government endeavor to co-opt Big Tech as it had the news media. YouTube and Netflix, among others, expressed their disapproval. For a government that often availed itself of social media’s hyperconnected virtues, you’d think this alone would have given the Liberals pause.

Yet Guilbeault barrelled onward, eschewing compromise even as his defence of the bill became increasingly incoherent. If you are reading these words within Quebec’s borders, you may have an inkling as to why: more than anywhere else in the country, matters of culture and language are abiding obsessions in the province, which happens to be key to Liberal success in the impending election. 

The hope, according to the Liberal organizers I’ve spoken with, is that Guilbeault’s buzzsaw approach will have primed Quebec voters to support the party come election day. And while it died before it could become law, thanks to the Liberals’ election call, Bill C-10 nonetheless provided the government with a handy collection of campaign-style talking points. To wit: the Liberals are on the side of culture, in Quebec and beyond. The opposition Conservatives have sided with YouTube. 

To understand why many Quebecers profess disdain for the YouTubes and Amazons of the world, it helps to see how they see the country around them—that is to say, they often don’t. Thirty-eight per cent of Quebec Baby Boomers and 35 per cent of its Gen Xers consider themselves Quebecers and Quebecers only, according to Code Québec, a book first released in 2016 that delves into Quebec’s often-contradictory identities. 

Code Québec adds weight to another truism: Quebecers have a studied indifference to (English) Canadian culture—the feeling is mutual, to be sure—as much as they are voracious consumers of their own. In compelling payment to artists and ensuring their “discoverability” on the various platforms, Bill C-10 is seen as a crucial volley against the omnipresent, all-consuming, English-speaking Big Tech Goliath. (It helps, too, that Guilbeault seems to genuinely distrust Big Tech. “I’m worried that my children will grow up in a world where these platforms are unregulated,” the minister once declared—on Facebook.)

These realities have created a funhouse-mirror effect between Quebec and the rest of the country. Academics in the province praised Guilbeault and his proposed law, as did columnists and a former CRTC consultant who helped draft the last incarnation of the Broadcasting Act. Quebec’s National Assembly unanimously adopted a motion supporting Bill C-10. The Liberal organizers I’ve spoken with over the summer have been pleased with Guilbeault’s springtime obsession with the issue, as are the people going door to door in the province. “C-10 has played well in Quebec,” Montreal Liberal MP Anthony Housefather told me.

The Liberals aren’t alone in plucking at Quebec’s cultural heartstrings. While the Conservative platform, released last week, promises a mandate review for most of (English) CBC, the party makes a notable exception for the (French) Radio-Canada. This is no coincidence. Radio-Canada long had a near-monopoly on French Quebec’s collective ears and eyeballs, and it remains one of the most recognized brands in the province. Also not a coincidence: during his recent stop in Quebec, Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole proclaimed his pro-choice bona fides and belief in man-made climate change, in a province where support for abortion and environmental issues is notably higher than in the land beyond it. 

The NDP, meanwhile, has been conspicuously muted on Legault’s egregious legislative crackdown on religious minorities. Leader Jagmeet Singh couldn’t muster a condemnation of the province’s law barring religious symbols from the bodies of certain government workers—even though it would prevent Singh himself, a practicing Sikh, from serving in many “positions of authority” within Quebec’s borders. 

The Liberal defence of Quebec culture may come at a price for the party, however. The party currently has 35 of the 78 seats in the province, with recent polls showing a nearly 10-point lead over the Bloc Québécois. Liberal strategists foresee a two-way race with the Bloc, and so the party has cozied up to Quebec Premier François Legault and his nationalist Coalition Avenir Québec in hopes of peeling off Bloc support. The party has pretzeled itself in the process. In June, the Liberals voted in favour of a motion supporting the CAQ bill that would unilaterally amend Canada’s constitution in order to make French the official language and common language of Quebec. Translation: Justin Trudeau supported legislation that would have turned his father Pierre into the picture of simmering indignation.

Several Montreal-area Liberal MPs abstained from the vote, and the party’s support has divided its Quebec caucus along linguistic lines, according to a Liberal strategist I spoke to. (“We do not have friction. We have dialogue,” said Housefather, one of those abstainers.) It also has the party worried that, in pursuing nationalist voters, the party’s traditional support from English and visible minorities in the province will simply stay home on election day, putting several current Liberal seats off the island of Montreal at risk of moving into the camp of the Bloc Québécois—a party that, in adhering to everything tumbling from François Legault, remains on the side of angels in the province. 

It’s a gambit, much like taking on Big Tech, that suggests the keys to a majority in Ottawa are buried somewhere in Quebec.