OTTAWA: The separatist Bloc Quebecois emerged from Tuesday’s Canadian general election with a stronger voice but its success is not a sign that the issue of Quebec independence is gaining support.

Gains for the Bloc do not imply more voters want to break ties with Ottawa, pollsters say. Rather, many turned to the party to protest Conservative proposals on bread-and-butter issues such as arts funding and youth crime.

Even so, the pro-independence party defied expectations at the start of the campaign that it would lose seats to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Instead the Bloc picked up two seats.

Quebec was an exception for the ruling Conservatives. The party gained ground in most of the country. As a result, it will have more clout than before the election even though it fell short of winning enough seats to form a majority government.

The Bloc now has 50 of Quebec’s 75 seats in the 308-seat federal House of Commons and won 38 per cent of the vote, 14 points ahead of any of its rivals.

Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe said he was proud that two out of three seats went to his party, and noted he spoke about sovereignty in every speech. Even so, he said the election was not about independence for “La Belle Province.” “This election, as all federal elections, are not votes about sovereignty,” Duceppe said at a news conference in Montreal. “I’m not interpreting the vote in this way.”

This is mainly because his party on its own cannot force another referendum on whether the French-speaking province should separate from Canada. That can only be done by the provincial government in Quebec, which happens now to be run by a party dedicated to keeping Canada together.

Separatism is in fact on the back burner in Quebec, with support consistently around 40 per cent in the last three years.

“It’s not dead, but it’s not an important issue (currently),” Leger pollster Jean-Marc Leger said.

Only two-thirds of those who voted for the Bloc on Tuesday appeared to support the separatist cause, voting for the Bloc because of what the Bloc represents, Leger exit polls revealed.

The other third said they voted Bloc in order to oppose the Conservatives.

In a 1995 referendum, 49.4 per cent of Quebec citizens voted in favour of Quebec sovereignty but support has retreated since then, partly because of fatigue over the never-ending issue.

For the Conservatives, who had carefully cultivated Quebec after dismal showings there in the 1990s and early 2000s, the result was a disappointment.

“After all the time and all the political capital they spent in Quebec over the past two years, and they haven’t been able to make the gains they want, I think that spells some really hard work ahead for the Conservative Party,” Antonia Maioni at McGill University in Montreal told CTV television.

The Conservatives had unexpectedly broken through in Quebec in 2006 with 10 seats, and then added another member in an election to fill a vacant seat. They ended up with 10 seats in Tuesday’s election.

“We maintained the breakthrough we made in 2006 but at the same time it’s true that we did not gain additional ground,” Harper told a news conference.

In fact, they lost a bit of ground in the province in the popular vote, falling to 21.7 per cent from the 24.6 per cent they got in 2006 and falling behind even the Liberal Party, which they had led in polls for most of the campaign.

Harper starts most of his events in French to try to reach out to Quebec, and earlier pushed through Parliament a recognition of the Quebec people that they form a nation within Canada.

His stumbling in the polls in Quebec this campaign had little to do with sovereignty and more to do with displeasure among some voters with cuts to arts funding and proposals to give adult sentences to violent teen criminals.

During the campaign the Conservatives had also said the Bloc had achieved little in its 18 years in Ottawa since it never was in government.

The Bloc responded that, aside from the sovereignty question, it was looking after Quebec’s interests – and on that, nearly two in five of the province’s voters agreed.—Reuters