Catching Up With Liberal Nominations – Quebec
Continuing our catch up of Liberal nominations from the last post, we move on to Québec.
Québec
The party has made it over the half-way mark in nominated candidates here, with over 40 candidates formalized out of 75, in spite of some turbulent times over the past year. Ticket sales for the annual fundraising dinner in Montréal fundraising dinner on May 13 were down to 700 from 1000 the previous year, Le Devoir’s Guillaume Bourgault-Côté reported. The following day on May 14, Québec PTA president Marc Lavigne resigned for family reasons, after only 4 months in the role. In a May 28 meeting called at the request of former party president Robert Fragasso, the party’s Québec wing accepted that resignation, and unanimously proceeded to name former Westmount – Ville-Marie, QC M.P. Lucienne Robillard as its president (but only after an unofficial race between Robillard and Coderre-loyalist, party secretary Stéphane Lacoste). The situation was deemed sufficiently urgent to resolve prior to a June 6 visit to Montréal by leader Michael Ignatieff, according to an email written by director Marc Bélanger. But a month earlier, Bélanger authored another email criticizing Ignatieff’s office for interfering in the affairs of the Québec section, and another PTA director Michel Faure rose to defend its executive director Louis-Philippe Angers against alleged “harassment”, reported La Presse’s Hugo de Grandpré. Other unnamed party sources told Vincent Marissal in his blog for La Presse that while Québec lieutenant Marc Garneau was “very nice” he had not “delivered” the way Coderre did, even if it was done by “crushing toes” in the latter’s case, and they hoped that Robillard’s ascent would signal a return to business for the section.
Apart from the two candidacies listed below, I haven’t been able to find any evidence of new nominations recently, however. In early April, I was told by a reader that meetings were being organized for four ridings, but that notice has since disappeared from both the PLC-Q website and the Google cache (part of the reason may be the section’s beautiful brand-new website; a notable improvement over two years ago when their site went un-updated for over a year). In any event, I have concluded after a long day of hunting through the news archives that there don’t seem to be any news clippings about three of them. Here are the four ridings whose meetings were apparently announced in April:
- Abitibi – Témiscamingue, QC
- Beauport – Limoilou, QC
- Gaspésie – Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC
- Portneuf – Jacques-Cartier, QC – The only clipping I could find about this riding hails from another time … well at least back last fall before Denis Coderre’s resignation as lieutenant. Le Journal de Québec reported in early September, 2009 that former Liberal M.P. Claude Duplain (2000-2004) was interested in running again. I’m not seeing any website or Facebook presence for him, and he’s not listed at Wikipedia as a current candidate, but LinkedIn shows him working as a special advisor to the Québec ministry of natural resources. Of course this is the seat won by Independent M.P. André Arthur in 2006, and which narrowly returned him over Bloc Québécois rival Richard Côté in 2008 when the Conservatives decided not to field a candidate. No word yet whether the Conservatives will run a candidate here next time around. However, the Green Party has already nominated Nelson Larivée as their candidate, back in October, 2009. It must have been particularly frustrating to Duceppe and Côté to lose to Arthur, who had won in 2006 spending just 1% of the limit, and was reelected spending barely 10%, when the Bloc campaign left half the spending limit on the table — spending just 49% of the limit, and then losing by only 1.5% of the vote. Côté was renominated early in this election cycle, and Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe has travelled to the riding frequently to campaign with him, vowing that this seat would be on their target list; and so far as I’ve been able to tell, Arthur is intending to run again as well.
If you have information about the other three ridings, I’d obviously be keen to hear about it. Meanwhile, on the north shore …
- Repentigny, QC – On March 24, Chantal Perrault joined a number of second-generation Liberal politicians in running for public office in that province. The daughter of the former mayor of l’Assomption and later PLQ MNA for the area, Perrault joins the sons of former MPs Francis Fox (Daniel Fox in Argenteuil – Papineau – Mirabel, QC) and the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Justin Trudeau in Papineau, QC) on the party’s Québec slate. A lawyer and founder of the firm Ombudsman Solution, Perrault will now face the youngest M.P. in the House of Commons, first-time Bloquiste Nicolas Dufour, and four-time NDP candidate and labour economist, Réjean Bellemare (one of only 4 Québec New Democrats to place 2nd in the last election, in spite of spending just 6% of the limit last time). No Conservative or Green Party candidates have been selected here as yet. At 53%, Dufour’s vote-share has dropped somewhat over the heady vote-shares of the late Benoît Sauvageau in 2004 and Father Raymond Gravel in the 2006 by-election that replaced him (70% and 66% respectively), but the Bloc Québecois clearly commands the majority in this riding, while the Liberals haven’t enjoyed a second place finish here since 2004 (also the last time they ran a fully-funded campaign in the riding), giving way first to the Conservatives and later to the NDP.
- Louis-Hébert, QC – On the other hand, still no evidence of a Liberal candidate in this Québec city-area riding, which had been won by Luc Harvey for the Conservatives in 2006, but was returned to the Bloc in 2008 by Pierre-Pascal Paillé (nephew of Hochelaga, QC M.P. Daniel Paillé). However, the same Journal de Québec story from last September referenced above, reported at the time that two candidates were then interested in running here — both businessman and former provincial cabinet minister Jean Leclerc and lawyer Jean Beaupré who ran here in 2008 — but that Denis Coderre had also ruled out any further run by former Liberal M.P. Hélène Scherrer in the riding, in spite of her interest in running again in her home constituency and the seat she held from 2000-2004. Nominated early for the Conservatives this time is the publisher of a french-language military magazine Pierre Paul-Hus. He joins Paillé who is already renominated himself, and first-time Green Party candidate Claude Gaumond. While Harvey scored a narrow victory over Paillé spending 78% of the limit in 2006, his 2008 return as submitted shows spending of 111% of the limit. It still has not passed the review stage by Elections Canada when I checked this evening, although I identified at least one addition error or typo on the as-submitted data, so a double-check may indeed bring his final total back down below the threshold. The riding’s Google Map shows it to be quite geographically segregated between polls won by the Conservatives and Bloc.
- Ahuntsic, QC – And while I knew that veteran city councillor Noushig Eloyan was being recruited to run in Ahuntsic by Denis Coderre, I seem to have missed the formal announcement of her candidacy on September 11, coming right on the heels of l’affaire Coderre. She has now been added to the database as well, although given that I can’t find any evidence of a nomination meeting anywhere we’ll have to categorize the selection method as an “appointment”; and she still doesn’t seem to have either a website or Facebook presence in spite of being one of the party’s top prospects in Québec according to a column of Chantal Hébert’s from last month. The riding has been a genuine two-party close contest between former Liberal M.P. and candidate Eleni Bakopanos and current two-term Bloc Québcois M.P. Maria Mourani, each election settled by a narrower margin than the last, with the riding’s Google Map showing very geographically segregated areas of strength for the two parties.
In terms of nomination coverage, the party’s areas of strength are more western than eastern province-wide, and more north shore than south shore, except for the Québec city area which is spotty on both the north and south shores, and the southeast part of the island of Montréal which is a Bloc stronghold. One surprising gap is the Verdun-area riding of Jeanne-Le Ber, QC, for which several candidates have been under consideration and later withdrawn over the past 18 months, including businesswoman Nathalie Le Prohon.
Next post we move to Ontario.
