CAQ breaks through on eastern part of island
The eastern part of Montreal Island was the stage for a number of upsets, breakthroughs and nailbiter finishes in the Quebec election on Monday.
Parti Québécois Leader JeanFrançois Lisée lost his seat in Rosemont riding to Québec solidaire candidate Vincent Marissal, a former journalist.
Meanwhile, Coalition Avenir Québec made a breakthrough on the island of Montreal, where it had never before won a seat, in two east-end ridings. In Pointe-auxTrembles, CAQ candidate Chantal Rouleau, the current borough mayor of Rivière-des-Prairies — Pointe-aux-Trembles, led from the moment voting results began trickling in. Rouleau beat her main rival, PQ candidate Jean-Martin Aussant, by 1,834 votes. Aussant, a former MNA, had returned to the PQ fold this year after leading his own party, Option nationale.
Now that she’s elected to the National Assembly, Rouleau will have to resign her seat as city councillor and borough mayor. She was reelected at the municipal level less than a year ago with the recently renamed Ensemble Montréal, the party of defeated mayor Denis Coderre.
In Bourget, which has consistently voted PQ since 1994, incumbent Maka Kotto lost to CAQ candidate Richard Campeau. Kotto, who represented the riding for the PQ since 2008, was trailing by 423 votes with 164 of 165 polls reporting. In 2014, Kotto beat the second-place Liberal candidate by nearly 3,000 votes. He beat the second-place CAQ candidate by nearly 9,000 votes in 2012.
QS went into this provincial election campaign with three seats in the east end of Montreal — Mercier, Gouin and Sainte-Marie — Saint-Jacques. Besides Rosemont, it nabbed an additional seat from the PQ in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve on Monday night. HochelagaMaisonneuve had gone with the PQ since the riding was created in 1989. But it went massively QS on Monday as the party’s candidate, Alexandre Leduc, defeated Carole Poirier by 5,946 votes, with 142 of 144 polls reporting.
This election was a third rematch for incumbent Poirier, who won the riding three times for the PQ, and Leduc, who was her main challenger in the 2014 and 2012 elections. Poirier beat Leduc by just over 1,000 votes in 2014, a much smaller margin than her victory by more than 6,000 votes over Leduc in the 2012 election.
QS co-spokesperson Manon Massé easily won re-election in Sainte-Marie — Saint-Jacques, leading her closest rival, Liberal Louis Charron, by 5,551 votes with 145 of 157 polls reporting. The party’s other co-spokesperson, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, also had an easy time in Gouin riding, winning with 58 per cent of the vote. He was first elected to the National Assembly in a byelection there in May 2017.
Maurice-Richard riding, formerly called Crémazie, went Liberal in 2014, but has swung back and forth between the PQ and the Liberals since its boundaries were drawn more than 40 years ago.
Liberal incumbent Marie Montpetit beat QS candidate Raphael Rebelo by 531 votes.
Mercier riding, which QS cofounder Amir Khadir took from the PQ in 2008, was going QS once again as Khadir’s successor, Ruba Ghazal, was leading with more than 54 per cent of the vote. Khadir decided not to run for re-election before the campaign began.
The remaining ridings of the eastern end of the island — Anjou — Louis-Riel, Bourassa-Sauvé, Jeanne-Mance — Viger, LaFontaine and Viau — are considered safe Liberal seats, and were not expected to produce surprises.
Frantz Benjamin, another sitting Montreal councillor and member of Ensemble Montréal, was leading for the Liberals in Viau.