VOTER TURNOUT for the Liberal leadership race shows Quebecers aren’t hostile to Trudeau — they’re indifferent

Son of Trudeaumania? Not in Quebec, Justin Trudeau’s home province, the second largest and a key battleground in the 2015 federal election.

The detailed results of Sunday’s federal Liberal leadership election show that Trudeau’s candidacy aroused little interest among Quebecers, especially French-speaking ones.

Anybody, even if he or she weren’t a party member, could sign up at no cost to vote in the online election.

But only 14,586 Quebecers did so, and only 11,929 bothered to click a mouse for one of the six candidates.

The number of votes cast in this province is equivalent to only 11 per cent of the votes across the country. That’s only half of Quebec’s 24 per cent share of the population.

Fewer votes were cast in the party’s former Quebec base than in the Prairie provinces, long an electoral dust bowl for Liberals.

An average of only 159 people voted in each riding in this province. That was only about one-third of the average constituency turnout in neighbouring Ontario.

In Quebec, the turnout was generally higher in the party’s few remaining strongholds in staunchly federalist areas, and lower in mainstream French Quebec, where the party needs to challenge the New Democratic Party.

In 16 of the 75 Quebec ridings, about one in five, fewer than 100 people voted. In three of those, the turnout was below 50.

With the vote in each constituency having equal weight, the 100 points for the northern riding of Abitibi–Baie-James–Nunavik–Eeyou were distributed on the basis of only 29 votes cast.

Much was made during the campaign, by Trudeau himself and others, of how he had taken his seat from the Bloc Québécois in 2008.

But as Alec Castonguay of L’actualité magazine was first to point out, Papineau was hardly a sovereignist stronghold.

It has voted Liberal in 21 of the 22 elections since 1953. The single-term BQ incumbent whom Trudeau defeated had won the seat with a plurality of only 990. And nearly half of the riding’s voters are non-francophones, traditional Liberal supporters.

In the 2011 election, Trudeau’s vote share declined slightly, to 38 per cent — or about the same as the previous Liberal member, the uncharismatic Pierre Pettigrew.

In fact, Trudeau might have lost his seat were it not for an almost even split in votes between the BQ and NDP.

It’s not that French-speaking Quebecers hate the Trudeau name (other than hardcore nationalists).

Polls late in the leadership campaign, when it was obvious Trudeau was going to win, vaulted the Liberals into first place in popularity in Quebec.

Even so, the usually temporary bounce in popularity a new leader gives a party was smaller in this province than elsewhere.

During the campaign, Trudeau spoke dismissively about the NDP “accidental MPs” who rode the late Jack Layton’s coattails into Parliament in 2011.

But they’re not Trudeau’s real adversaries in Quebec. That’s Layton’s successor as NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair.

And in a Nanos Research-CBC poll late in the Liberal campaign, Quebecers generally rated Mulcair higher than Trudeau on different leadership qualities.

Also, Mulcair, a former provincial Liberal cabinet minister, has a strong political identification with Quebec that Justin Trudeau lacks.

It’s often forgotten that, at least at the start of his political career, Pierre Trudeau was strongly identified with promoting the interests of French-speaking Quebecers, through official bilingualism and “French Power” in the federal government.

His son, however, lacks that identification. That might be one reason, figuratively speaking, the response to Justin Trudeau among French-speaking Quebecers has been a gesture identified with his late father.

Not a raised middle finger. A shrug.