Holding Montreal Island seats now Liberals’ top priority

MONTREAL— Are the federal Liberals about to run out of safe seats in Quebec? Six months ago, the question would not have crossed anyone’s mind. Back then, Justin Trudeau seemed poised to hold the handful of seats that had withstood the 2011 orange wave and win back a chunk of the ground lost over the last three elections.

Today, according to the latest CROP poll, the party is running a dismal third across francophone Quebec, 38 points behind the NDP.

If the federal election had been held this week, the Liberals would again have been locked out of most of the province.

Even on Montreal Island, some of the remaining Liberal strongholds are under siege.

In Mount Royal, Anthony House- father, the municipal politician tasked with keeping Pierre Trudeau’s former seat and the riding’s large Jewish community in the fold, is facing a serious Conservative challenge.

In Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, former astronaut Marc Garneau has a fight on his hands. This month the former head of the Old Brewery Mission, Jim Hughes, beat five opponents for the NDP nomination. Liberals familiar with the riding believe he is a serious threat to one of the party’s last Quebec stars.

The NDP says it has also set its sights on Trudeau’s own Papineau riding. Former CBC/Radio-Canada journalist Anne Lagacé Dawson will carry the party flag in that battle.

By talking up their prospects in Papineau, the New Democrats may be getting ahead of themselves. Trudeau has established a personal connection to the riding and he did beat poor Liberal odds twice.

Still, in the last election the Bloc Québécois won 26 per cent of the votes in Papineau. If that support collapses in favour of the New Democrats — as it has been provincewide — the Liberal leader could be in trouble.

For the many federal Liberals in Quebec who saw Trudeau as a saviour at the time of his leadership victory two years ago, the first three weeks of the election campaign have been sobering ones. The party is nowhere near where it had expected to be in Quebec.

Some of that climate change was in evidence as the Liberals picked a candidate for the riding of Ahuntsic-Cartierville on Sunday. More than 2,000 members showed up to vote for one of the four contenders but despite the record attendance, the mood of the senior Liberals on hand for the meeting was, for the most part, subdued.

It took Mélanie Joly — a former Montreal mayoral contender — three ballots to win the nomination, to the immense relief of the Trudeau team. She was the leader’s hand-picked candidate and the last thing he needed as his party tries to finds its bearings in Quebec was what would have been cast as a nomination debacle.

But Joly’s path to a seat in the House of Commons has undeniably become rockier since she first set out to run for Trudeau. While the Liberals have been engaged in a prolonged and divisive nomination contest, former BQ MP Maria Mourani has been working the riding hard on behalf of Mulcair.

For now, the Liberals’ game plan in Trudeau’s home province still involves trying to climb out of the basement in francophone Quebec.

In that spirit, over the weekend, the party made public a four-page letter to Premier Philippe Couillard designed to highlight Trudeau’s openness to the demand for a more collegial relationship with Ottawa.

It included a promise to allow provinces to opt out of federal programs with full compensation in areas of provincial jurisdiction and an acknowledgement of Quebec’s “unique” character and its government’s “specific responsibilities” in the areas of language and culture. All in all, Trudeau is committing to a more flexible approach to federalism and Quebec than that of his father.

Time will tell whether those overtures amount to too little, too late.

The Liberals can hardly give up on Quebec without giving up on a victory in October. But unless the party’s numbers improve, holding the thin Montreal red line and saving Trudeau’s seat (and possibly his leadership) will take absolute precedence over bringing the Liberals back from the dead in the rest of the province. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.