Byelection shows Quebec is again a two-horse race.
The results of the Chicoutimi-Le Fjord byelection suggest the Bloc Québécois chapter in Quebec electoral history is over — and that the NDP’s is closing.
The convincing Conservative victory on Monday night may not offer great insights into how the general election will play out next year, particularly given the low voter turnout of just 36 per cent.
Conservative candidate Richard Martel, a former coach of the Chicoutimi Saguenéens junior hockey team, is a local hero and his reputation carried the Tories to first from fourth last time.
But it is clear that for the first time since 1991 the next election in Quebec will be a two-horse race between the Liberals and Conservatives, with the Bloc and NDP confined to the margins.
Liberal Denis Lemieux won the seat in 2015 with just 31 per cent of the vote because it was a four-way fight. Those days are over — for now, at least.
The Bloc won the Chicoutimi riding in 1993, 2004, 2006 and 2008. The NDP won in 2011. On Monday, they secured a combined 14 per cent of the vote, compared to 53 per cent for Martel and 29 per cent for Liberal candidate Lina Boivin.
“Canadians are increasingly voting in terms of what they believe the opportunity that is present is going to lead for them in their own lives,” said Liberal social development minister and Quebec City MP JeanYves Duclos Tuesday. “The old political habits of voting Liberal when you’re born and Liberal when you’re dead, that is disappearing. We’ve seen evidence of this over the last years. So that just puts more pressure on political parties to continuously demonstrate their relevance to electors.”
The New Democrats currently have 16 seats in the province, but another byelection is looming in the Outremont seat of former leader Tom Mulcair, and there are few grounds for optimism for new leader Jagmeet Singh.
Singh was frank when he spoke with reporters on Tuesday. “At the end of the day, the issues that we raised, it’s clear that we’re not penetrating and we’re not connecting with people. We need to make sure that our message resonates with people, connects with people. … I was there a number of times and I got a great reception, but that great reception on a one-onone basis with people didn’t translate into votes. I want to make sure that we find a way to translate that connection that I’m able to build with people into votes,” he said.
He still has time to turn things around, but some close observers of the Quebec scene are predicting the NDP could be reduced to a single seat in the province — that of Ruth Ellen Brosseau in Berthier-Maskinongé.
The Bloc won 10 seats in 2015 but the party imploded earlier this year when seven MPs split from the party over the leadership style of then-Bloc leader Martine Ouellet, creating the breakaway Québec Debout. Ouellet was forced to step down, prompting two of those defecting MPs to re-join. But even internally there is confusion over whether the party’s prime directive is Quebec independence or the “protection” of the province’s interests.
This is the party that won the most seats in Quebec in six consecutive general elections beginning in 1993. It is now on the verge of extinction. Former leader Michel Gauthier joined the Conservatives in Chicoutimi to campaign against the Bloc because, he said, the party has no future.
The support for Quebec nationalism that surged after the failure of the Meech Lake accord in 1990 has crested and the outlets for those feelings now seem to be the Conservatives federally and the Coalition Avenir Québec provincially. The centre-right CAQ was nine points up on the Quebec Liberal Party in the most recent Leger poll, ahead of a provincial election on Oct. 1 this year.
Insiders credit the strong Conservative performance in Quebec to Alain Reyes, Andrew Scheer’s lieutenant in the province, who has been responsible for strategy and candidate recruitment. The new team has picked policies that might appeal to soft nationalists — allowing Quebec to collect federal taxes on Ottawa’s behalf, for example, and giving the province more control over culture and immigration.
In Parliament the Conservatives have focused on the issue of asylum seekers from the U.S., something that impacts Quebec disproportionately because of the numbers entering at illegal crossings in that province.
There were, it seems, no immediate repercussions from last week’s dust-up when Scheer removed native son Maxime Bernier from his shadow cabinet for his ongoing campaign against supply management. That decision may even have helped make the Conservative case in a region where there remains considerable sympathy for dairy farmers, while Justin Trudeau’s admission on U.S. television that he is willing to be “flexible” on dairy in free trade negotiations may have hurt him. All that said, the Liberals who shrug off the loss of a seat as being the product of the Conservatives picking the right candidate are surely correct.
“It’s similar to what happened in South Surrey-White Rock,” said one informed Liberal source, referring to the B.C. byelection last December in which former local mayor Gordie Hogg snatched a seat for the Liberals from the Conservatives on the basis of name recognition. “But it’s not like the Liberals are poised to sweep B.C., or the Conservatives to sweep Quebec,” said the source.
The Liberals, and Trudeau in particular, remain popular in Quebec.
An average of public opinion polls shows the Grits down on their highs from earlier this year but still registering around 42 per cent support — double the percentage backing the second-placed Conservatives.
The prime minister campaigned hard in a region where there are four aluminum smelters subject to Donald Trump’s 10-per-cent import tariff.
A Liberal majority at the next election may require the party to pick up as many as 20 seats in Quebec to compensate for losses expected elsewhere across the country. They have high hopes of making those gains at the expense of the NDP and the Bloc.
In the case of the latter, while its demise has been rumoured and exaggerated in the past, winning just five per cent of the vote in the nationalist Saguenay region suggests it will soon be an ex-party.
That is an obituary notice that much of the country will read with great pleasure.