Report calls PQ an aging social club

QUEBEC CITY • The Parti Québécois has become an aging, disconnected social club with a mentality stuck in the past, a new report suggests.

Produced by former party leadership candidate Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who spent months consulting the party’s small “under 40” crowd, the report paints a gloomy picture.

“In the PQ, youth are like a rare Pokemon that people seek for years and when you find one you get a picture,” St-Pierre Plamondon writes in a report, leaked Wednesday to the Journal de Montréal.

He backs his argument with hard facts. Of the 89,000 members, 68 per cent are over 55 years old. A mere 14 per cent are aged 16 to 40.

Among the findings: Nearly all the youth Plamondon met had just about no interest in the debate over religious symbols. The party’s handling of the debate over the PQ’s defunct charter of values was a major turnoff for many youth.

“There is a feeling the party is a social club of people who, while nice and easy to approach, have known each other for many years and are happy to be together on their own.”

Plamondon, who started his consultation process last October after losing his leadership bid to Jean-François Lisée, says there is a feeling in the party that it has lost its “humanist” side.

The party, he says, is “frozen in the past, conservative and aging.”

Worse for the future, the party barely speaks to its membership about diversity, and those minorities who do join are “fed up at being asked where they come from or to be tagged with a visible minority label.”

Plamondon, who met with 2,000 people at 90 different events during his consultation, makes 108 recommendations including obliging executive members who are over 70 to retire. The party should also give itself the power to ban members who behave like trolls on social media.

At a news conference before the PQ’s morning caucus, Lisée, who commissioned the report, welcomed it.

“We got our money’s worth, we really got our money’s worth,” he said. “There is nothing extraordinarily surprising. It’s more detailed and what’s great is the 100 recommendations about how to go forward from now on. I think it will help us a lot.”

But Vachon MNA Martine Ouellet, who is also seeking the leadership of the Bloc Québécois, poured cold water on the report, saying it is “alarmist.”