Winning votes in Ontario by campaigning in separatist Quebec

JONQUIERE, Que. – At first blush, you would think that Stephen Harper had ventured into electoral no-man’s land when his plane landed this afternoon at CFB Bagotville, near Jonquiere, in the Saguenay region of the province, northeast of Quebec City. He arrived here to talk about how he would beef up the base here and boost the military in Quebec more generally. Still, it’s hard to see how that will help him elect a Conservative here.

In 2004, the poor Tory candidate here, Gilles Lavoie, finished well up the track with just 2,217 votes — less than five per cent of all votes cast.

Sebastien GagnonThe winner — and incumbent here in the federal riding of Jonquiere-Alma — is Sebastien Gagnon, (left), first elected in 2002 and trying for this third straight win. Given the current love affair that all of Quebec has with all things Bloc Quebecois, it seems an easy prediction to make that Gagnon is a heavy favourite here. He garnered 55 per cent of the vote here last year, besting his nearest challenger, the Liberal, by nearly 12,000 votes.

The riding is in a part of Quebec that has heavy separatist sentiments. In 1995, the 100,000 or so people here — more than 80 per cent of whom speak only French — voted 71 per cent in favour of sovereignty in the referendum of that year.

So why should Stephen Harper campaign here when there are so many other ridings he might better spend his time where a candidate has a decent shot of winning?

Senator Marjory LeBreton — she is travelling with Harper campaign to answer just these sorts of questions — says it’s not a given that this riding is a lost cause. The Conservative candidate is Jean-Pierre Blackburn, who represented this part of Canada as a Conservative MP in the 1980s during the Mulroney years. So, in Sen. LeBreton’s view, M. Blackburn has some of the advantages of the incumbent when it comes to name recognition.

Secondly, Conservative strategists believe that, if they are to knock off the Liberals, they must be seen by voters in all parts of the country but particularly in Ontario as a credible federalist alternative in Quebec. Coming into Quebec, getting some French press, and speaking, as Mr. Harper does, about how he is the heir to Rene Levesque when it comes to cleaning up government and election finance laws gives the Conservatives the kind of legitimacy in this province they lacked during Stockwell Day’s leadership. Mind you — for all that, it will be a significant achievement if they win three seats here and they can still form a minority government without winning any.

That said Quebec has strategic value for Conservatives. As Sen. LeBreton pointed out, some voters in Ontario are influenced in their voting patterns by which way the wind is blowing in Quebec. Similarly, Quebecers have been known to jump on an Ontario bandwagon, that is if Quebeckers see Ontario is about to vote in a Conservative government, Quebeckers may decide to send a few Conservative MPs of their own to Ottawa if only to sit at the cabinet table.

It’s a difficult thing to explain, this strange symbiosis of Ontario and Quebec voters, but it’s one that both federalist parties believe in.

 

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