PC win in Quebec byelection is a lesson for others
Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are not going to allow Justin Trudeau to rebuild a Liberal fortress in Quebec without a fight: that’s just one of the messages from Monday’s Chicoutimi—Le Fjord’s byelection upset. And some of the other messages — in particular for the New Democrats — are more alarming than others.
But first some essential electoral geography pertaining to the Quebec riding where 53 per cent of voters turned their backs on Trudeau, trading a seat on the government benches for a Conservative one on Monday.
In the last federal election, every party won some of its Quebec seats in tight four-way battles. Had a small fraction of the vote dispersed differently, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord could just as easily have ended up in the opposition column.
Among the Quebec ridings the Liberals won on election night 2015, they registered their second lowest share of the vote in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord.
Six other Liberal seats in the province — including that of Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos — are in the same fragile category.
Monday’s byelection results suggest the four-way splits observed in Quebec in 2015 will not be a feature of next year’s general election. That’s a fact the Liberals (and also the Conservatives) will have to factor in their calculations.
Chicoutimi—Le Fjord also has a fickle history. It changed federal allegiance in five of the seven last general elections. The Tories, the Bloc, the Liber- als and the NDP have all had turns at representing the riding. Before 2015, the Liberals had last held the seat during Jean Chrétien’s last term in office. It was less than a full embrace of the party itself. At the time, voters essentially followed floor-crossing MP André Harvey from the Tories to the Liberals.
To score a win on Monday, Scheer did not reinvent the wheel. He borrowed a page from Brian Mulroney’s handbook and made overtures to nationalist voters fleeing the Bloc’s civil war. And, like Stephen Harper often did before him, Scheer recruited a candidate whose local popularity stood to make up for his own lack of Quebec coattails.
Over the past month, newly elected MP Richard Martel — a former hockey coach — introduced his leader to Chicoutimi voters rather than the reverse.
At 5.6 per cent, the Bloc Québécois score is the kind of result the party typically registers in staunchly federalist territory, not in a nationalist region like the Saguenay. That score offers the feuding federal sovereignists a glimpse at their non-existent political future should they insist on going in next year’s general election campaign as a house divided.
Scheer can only hope the Bloc remains in its current death spiral, as the Conservatives are best placed to continue to benefit from its demise. The Quebecers who stuck by the BQ in the last election may be the least likely to switch to a Liberal party led by someone whose last name is Trudeau. And if they were not tempted by Jack Layton’s NDP, they are unlikely to be wooed by Jagmeet Singh. The New Democrats, who slipped from a close second place in 2015 to a miserable 8.7 per cent share of the vote, have seen their worst fears confirmed. The party’s hard- earned Quebec footprint is fading fast.
The Liberals had expected to benefit from the NDP collapse. That did not happen. Their share of the vote remained relatively stable with a variation of less than 2 per cent from the general election. But turnout was down from 66 per cent to 36 per cent. A lot of voters stayed home on Monday.
As Chicoutimi—Le Fjord went this week, Quebec will not necessarily go next year.
But there are lasting takeaways from this week’s vote.
With a less-polarizing figure such as Scheer at the helm, it will be harder for the Liberals to rally Quebecers against the Conservatives. In Quebec, he will not suffer from comparisons to his unpopular predecessor. And, at least in this byelection, raising Harper’s ghost to spook voters did not do the trick.
By the same token, the Liberals are living dangerously by continuing to count almost exclusively on Trudeau’s star power to hold his home province.
The prime minister campaigned in the Chicoutimi—Le Fjord and the government showered money on the region, all to little or no avail.
It may not be noticeable from inside the Parliament Hill bubble but, by comparison to both their Conservative and NDP rivals, Trudeau’s Quebec MPs lack presence in their province. Almost three years in, the prime minister might as well be running a one-man show. That is particularly true outside Montreal.
Luckily for the Liberals, their next big byelection test will take place on the friendlier territory of Montreal’s Outremont riding. For Trudeau, the stakes in winning back Thomas Mulcair’s soon-to-be vacated seat have just gone up.