Stakes high in byelection in QC’S Louis Hébert riding

party of Daniel Johnson, but came away with fewer seats.

When the Liberals returned to power under Robert Bourassa in 1970, the new member for Louis Hébert was Claude Castonguay, who co-chaired a commission on health care in Quebec. Upon his election, Bourassa tasked Castonguay to implement the plan as health minister. Castonguay did not run in the 1973 election, but was called upon subsequently to offer his wisdom on the evolution of the system he helped create. He’s still on the scene at age 88.

The 1976 election found Louis Hébert joining the nationalist surge with the Parti Québecois, electing Claude Morin, one of the key players in the René Lévesque government. After the PQ lost the 1980 referendum, Morin left politics. One story is he was frustrated by the defeat; the other explanation is he was shown the door having been exposed as a paid informant for the RCMP.

Morin’s Liberal opponent in the 1976 election was Jean Marchand, one of the three “wise men” Prime Minister Lester Pearson recruited in Quebec to combat separatism. Marchand, who was Pearson’s initial choice to succeed him as Liberal leader, was named to the Senate after the failed provincial adventure, by Pearson’s second choice, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Louis Hébert would swing back and forth between the PQ and the Liberals over the next 40 years, voting Oui in both the 1980 and 1995 referendums, and drawing such fated candidates as future PQ star minister Louise Beaudoin, flashy crusading lawyer Guy Bertrand, controversial radio host André Arthur, and, in the 2003 election that brought Jean Charest to power, Guy Laforest, a prominent Laval University political science professor and sovereignist, who ran for the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ), finishing a close third to the PQ candidate.

That election was the first of five that Liberal Sam Hamad would win. In two of those contests, 2007 and 2012, the candidates for the ADQ and its successor, the Coalition Avenir Québec, were nipping at Hamad’s electoral heels.

The point being that, based on previous voting history, Louis Hébert is a winnable riding for the CAQ.

So the stakes are mighty high in the by-election for all three competitive parties. The importance of the race, however, seems to have escaped the Liberal and CAQ vetters, both of whose candidates dropped out on the same day for the same reason of dubious behaviour in their previous occupations.

Both parties quickly found new candidates, coincidentally, women with no known record of workplace antics. The Liberals turned to Syrian-born Sam Hamad’s trusty right-hand woman for many years, Moroccan-born Ihssane El Ghernati, 51.

The CAQ opted for the calming face of tragedy, 34-year-old Geneviève Guilbault, spokesperson for the Quebec coroner’s office during the Lac Mégantic and L’isle‑verte disasters. She worked as a media advisor under previous Liberal governments.

Polls show the CAQ overtaking the PQ as the most likely potential alternative to the Liberals in the general election less than a year away. Louis Hebert, thus, becomes a test of whether leader Francois Legault can make gains in what could be a fertile urban territory for a quasi-nationalist, conservative-leaning party. In the 2007 election, which brought the ADQ to official Opposition status under Mario Dumont, the party won seven of the 11 seats in the Quebec City region.

The PQ candidate in the by-election is Normand Beauregard, a civil servant and biologist, who - you never know - may end up surprising both the Liberals and PQ in Louis Hebert.