NDP in Quebec: Who are these prospective MPs?

With all the excitement/panic/drama surrounding the apparent NDP wave in Quebec, it's fair to wonder who might suddenly become the new crop of MPs from Quebec if polling data translates into seats in the House of Commons. I, for one, am very curious. Here in Guelph, the NDP ran fourth in the 2008 election, and even today, a week before the election, there is still no candidate bio on the website for the local candidate, Bobbi Stewart. I have no idea from the website who she is, other than the election preparedness chair for the local riding association.

If that's the case in Ontario, it's no surprise that speculation is rampant about the Quebec crop of candidates for the party. The Globe and Mail has started digging, and has turned up at least a handful of university students. I'm not surprised at all. When I volunteered for the local NDP candidate in Outremont in the 2004 election, I was rather surprised to discover that the entire provincial campaign was being run out of a single office on St. Laurent Blvd, and that most of the candidates for the province were in fact the campaign management team, based almost entirely out of Montreal, many of them university students, and most of them under thirty years of age. A quick glance through the list of candidates seems to indicate that this is again the case in at least a sizeable number of ridings.

As a person who genuinely would love to see the NDP replace the Bloc as the choice of Quebec voters, I'm hoping that some of the blue seats in that province will turn orange, and that the newly elected MPs will do a good job. It's just that nagging memory of the ADQ surge to become the official opposition in Quebec in 2007 that has me a little concerned of what could happen when a series of placeholder candidates suddenly become MPs.

Let's just say that I'm hopeful, yet concerned...

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Montreal vs ROQ: Homophobia in the Quebec Election

Last week, it was his cocaine use, this week, it's his homosexuality. Sadly, the issue that I predicted would dog André Boisclair on the campaign trail has indeed come up, raised by a shock-jock radio host in the Saguenay, where another openly gay candidate, Sylvain Gaudreault, is running for the PQ in Jonquière.

For a campaign which started off nasty, things just seem to be getting worse and worse, and the main beneficiary of the turmoil appears to be the ADQ, which is making huge gains in Quebec City and the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region, if you believe the polls.

My read on this isn't that it's the fact that Boisclair is gay that is the central issue. As Chantal Hébert has pointed out in her new book French Kiss, which I started devouring last night, it's the fact that Boisclair is so emblematic of urban Montreal, and by extension, so appears the PQ. As we saw in the last federal election, Canadian politics appears to increasingly be reflecting a split in political (and social) values along urban-rural lines. In Quebec, this is why we see the issues of multiculturalism (or interculturalism, as it's called there), and sexuality being used as wedge issues.

Progressive Canadians should be very concerned about this trend. Rural and small-town Canada is better represented in the legislatures on a per-capita basis than the cities are, and those discontented voices will be able to flex their muscle if a) we leave the distribution of seats as it currently stands, and b) more effort isn't made to spread progressive values in smaller communities.

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Quebec election - The Third Parties

Not one to be easily shoved aside in what is usually a two-way race, Mario Dumont has come out swinging to try to make the ADQ relevant in this election. Yesterday, he was talking about a Quebec citizenship and a Quebec constitution, to lay out the terms for "reasonable accomodation" of immigrants to the province. This seems to be one of his big cards for rural Quebec. Today, he announced support for two-tier health care in Outremont, with his star candidate declaring himself in favour of allowing individuals to completely opt out of the public health care system. This strikes me as a risky strategy in a province where the right wing is getting awfully crowded, but is fighting for a smaller pool of voters than in other provinces. I'm not certain if talking about private health care in Montreal, where it might seem more viable, will appeal as much to voters in Trois-Pistoles. But it certainly seems that M. Dumont is trying to make this a policy-oriented election, rather than allowing Boisclair and Charest to fight it out on the federalist-separatist battleground.

With all of this attention on the right-of-centre, it will be interesting to see what Quebec Solidaire can do in its efforts to target a few Montreal ridings with its left-wing message. Traditionally, you could count on the PQ to occupy the left wing of the political spectrum, and Boisclair's drift to the right has alienated this wing of the party. Are voters alienated enough to take a risk with a new party? This could become an interesting question, particularly as vote-splitting seems to be a likely phenomenon this year.

I'm writing this post from the riding of Mercier, in Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood, and the signs are sprouting rapidly on lampposts. Election fever is in the air, and it's going to be a bumpy ride.

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