3-way race in fickle Beauportlimoilou
Working class neighbourhood has been fickle
Door-knocking in her central Quebec City riding of Beauport-limoilou, Bloc Québécois MP Julie Vignola is disarmingly honest: she was surprised when she won her seat in 2019 and it would be a surprise if she won it again on Monday.
“Seriously, I think it'll be another surprise, specifically because of the historic dynamic of this riding,” she said as she walked from door to door of a low-income housing complex in Maizerets, a working-class sector at the northern tip of La Cité-limoilou neighbourhood and just a few kilometres north of the provincial capital's emblematic old city.
Beauport-limoilou has been fickle and can be a cruel mistress to incumbent MPS. Since the riding was created in 2004, only one candidate has ever been elected twice consecutively — Conservative MP Sylvie Boucher in 2006 and 2008. After, it jumped to the NDP (2011), then back to the Conservatives (2015) before returning to the Bloc in 2019.
The riding has also been a relatively reliable barometer of the Quebec City area's political leanings over the past two decades. Vignola was elected as part of the Bloc wave in 2019, it voted NDP as part of the Orange Wave in 2011, and otherwise it has mostly voted Conservative in years when the party had some of its best results in the province.
And, like much of Quebec City and the surrounding ridings, it has not elected a Liberal since the turn of the century.
And this 2021 campaign is shaping up to be no less of a nail biter with Vignola and her main adversaries, Liberal Anne Gagnon and Conservative (and former MP) Alupa Clarke, all essentially tied, according to polling aggregator 338Canada.
But if the former teacher is at all nervous about her prospects of getting re-elected, it doesn't show when she's out meeting voters living in subsidized housing on a scorching Saturday afternoon.
While some candidates try to fly through discussions with voters to knock on as many doors as possible in one day, Vignola easily spends 10 minutes chatting with each household about their lives, their interests and why Quebec is better served by having a strong Bloc presence in Ottawa.
“I am a motor-mouth,” she said with a laugh. “The teacher is never quite far from the politician.”
Her main objective this year: make voters understand the value of being represented by the Quebec-centric but perennial-opposition party that is the Bloc.
“People tell me, `But you will never be able to take power.' We don't want to take power! I want them to understand the value of the opposition, particularly in the context of a minority government,” Vignola said. “That's the most democratic form of government you can have.”
Whereas Vignola's attitude and campaign gives off a sense of “go with the flow,” her Conservative opponent is the complete opposite.
Since his staffing contract in leader Erin O'toole's office ended in the early spring, Alupa Clarke's sole objective — nay, obsession — has been to win back the riding he represented between 2015 and 2019.
It's near impossible not to know that Clarke is running because most of the riding is covered in his signs. His campaign office, a massive space on the edge of a new development sector in Beauport that has its own studio space for virtual news conferences, has “Alupa” plastered in nearly every window with links to his website.
In fact, Clarke is the only candidate in the entire Conservative Party to have his first name, not his last, featured in big bold letters. “Alupa is my trademark,” he said.
“I am the most organized non-mp candidate in the country,” Clarke said in an interview. “Every promotional item, the flyers, the business cards, the door hangers, the website, my backdrops, my roll-up signs, I made it all myself. I am my own campaign director.”
When door-knocking, Clarke demands clockwork efficacy from the volunteers accompanying him. While he's walking toward a door, the day's volunteer must tell him the names of all known residents at that address that are contained in the party's internal database and app.
Then after the encounter, they must write if the resident was a supporter, opponent or undecided as well as any new relevant contact information, before starting over again with the next house.
“Everything that I do is surgical to maximize the chances of victory,” he said.
With a median household income just shy of $48,000, the riding is among the 10 poorest in Canada. It's also one of the least diverse ridings in the province, with over 98 per cent of residents identifying as French Canadians and nearly 93 per cent as a non-visible minority in the 2016 census.
So his pitch to many residents nearly always contains a variant of the same argument: “Conservatives want to protect Quebec's identity.”
But the Bloc and the Conservatives are far from the only ones with pull from blue collar and working-class residents in the riding.
Liberal candidate Ann Gingras, a heavyweight union leader in the Quebec City area, decided to leave her post and jump into the political fray just before the election.
Gingras said she was heavily courted by many political parties over the years, but it was calls with Liberal minister Mélanie Joly and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that convinced her over the summer.
And it was quite the summer for her, as five locals of the union she headed (Conseil central Québec-chaudière-appalaches CSN) went on strike, some of which garnered significant media attention.
But she said her biggest file ever was “fixing the issues caused by the Conservative government” while representing workers at Davie shipyard, which was controversially excluded from the Harper government's national shipbuilding plan.
“When Alupa was an MP, I never met with him,” as opposed to all his predecessors and successors.
A short walk through Limoilou streets with Gingras shows how much recognition she gets from locals after 22 years at the head of the local CSN division, with numerous people stopping to congratulate her for jumping into politics and pledging to vote for her.
“I want to change things. I want to participate in change for people, and that's with the Liberal party,” Gingras said. “I never thought I'd say this one day, but the Liberal party of Canada is a progressive party.
“I would be hard-pressed to tell you what the Bloc Québécois has done concretely here. What can you do when you're an opposition party and you only represent one part of the country?” she added.
Like many poorer central neighbourhoods in major Canadian cities, certain parts of both Beauport and Limoilou have slowly but increasingly gentrified.
And that's where the NDP sees potential growth for their party and candidate Camille Esther Garon, a 26-year-old African-quebecer lesbian community activist and social entrepreneur.
Much like her party leader, Garon's campaign is focused as much on reaching voters on the ground as speaking to younger voters on social media, including video app Tiktok.
“My biggest challenge is to get people to know me, and get people to know the NDP,” she said in an interview.
“I'm a very enthusiastic person, I'm a very optimistic person,” she said. ““People are excited, and they sense a new momentum with us.”
SERIOUSLY, I THINK IT'LL BE ANOTHER SURPRISE.