A look at the races in York-Simcoe and Outremont, where the NDP will try to hang on to former leader Thomas Mulcair’s seat,
OTTAWA— It’s the other byelection that really matters to the NDP.
Of course, the third-place party — like its Liberal, Conservative and Green opponents — will compete for votes in all three federal byelections scheduled for Monday. But the contest in Burnaby South has grabbed most of the attention. That’s where the NDP’s unelected leader, Jagmeet Singh, is vying for his first-ever seat in the House of Commons.
But when the votes are counted Monday night, New Democrats will also look with special interest to the result in Outremont, a Montreal riding with deep symbolic value to the party, said Karl Bélanger, the president of the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation who was principal secretary to former leader Thomas Mulcair.
Bélanger explained how the riding entered party lore after Mulcair wrested it from the Liberals in a byelection in 2007. Mulcair won it again the following year, the first time the NDP clinched a seat in Quebec during a general election. This was seen as the “precursor to the Orange Wave in 2011,” when the NDP’s 59-seat victory in Quebec lifted the party to its best federal election result ever, Bélanger said.
Mulcair, who became leader after Jack Layton’s death, won Outremont a fourth time in 2015.
“It showed the progression of the New Democrats in Quebec,” Bélanger said.
“It is of course also the seat of a former leader and as such is really important.”
The seat in Outremont, however, has been vacant since last summer, when Mulcair resigned as a member of parliament. The party is now trying to hold the riding in the face of dispiriting poll results in the province, and buck the trend that has established itself under Singh’s leadership: the party vote share in every bylection since he became leader has dropped below what it was in the 2015 general election.
“If they get a good secondplace result it will already be a victory for New Democrats that will show not everything is lost in Quebec,” said Bélanger.
Julia Sanchez, the NDP’s candidate in Outremont, said the riding’s importance to the party motivated her to run. She said she offers voters continuity after 12 years with an NDP representative, and that her focus is sending a message to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he is failing to act with urgency on climate change.
She is calling on the federal government to cut all subsidies and investment in fossil-fuel development, and that if she wins, she will be advocate for a “clear rejection” of new pipeline development from within the NDP caucus.
“Tom was elected four times here, so we have a strong base,” she told the Star last week. “Our starting point is an excellent record in the riding that we want to preserve and enhance.”
But the Liberals have deep roots in the riding, too. Outremont was a Liberal seat for all but five years from 1935 until Mulcair’s byelection win in 2007. Rachel Bendayan, a local lawyer and community activist who is the “Team Trudeau” candidate in the byelection, ran against the former NDP leader in 2015, when she lost by less than 5,000 votes.
Jasmine Louras is running for the Conservatives in the riding, while Michel Duchesne is vying for the seat with the Bloc Québécois and Daniel Green is the Green Party candidate.