Friday 14 September 2007

An NDP Win in Outremont?

La Presse reports that a poll of the Outremont riding shows the NDP candidate Thomas Mulcair leading the Liberal Jocelyn Coulon, 38% to 32 % in the federal by election set for next Monday. The Bloc Québécois candidate Jean-Paul Gilson follows with a meager 14 % and the Conservative Gilles Duguay comes in fourth. Some 43% of electors say they could change their minds before the election, while 41% say they aren’t interested, so it’s definitely not over.

It’s clear, though, that the Liberals are really frightened. Even though every one who knows me, knows that I’ve been an NDP stalwart for years, I got a call yesterday morning from a woman who lives in another riding and who I worked with in an anti-pollution group 35 years ago when I first came to Montreal. I don’t think our paths have crossed since, but she wanted to talk to me about the election and how “we have to beat Stephen Harper” by electing a Liberal in Outremont. Needless to say, I don’t think that—rather I think that the best message would be the shock treatment of an NDP victory—and I brushed her off. But the fact that Liberals are scraping the bottom of the barrel in this manner says a lot about what is happening here.

The La Presse poll also shows the Liberal coming in fourth in the rural riding of Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot with 5%, where the Bloc Québécois candidate got 49%, the Conservatives, 32%, and the NDP, 7% . The riding is considered a Bloc stronghold: its candidate is a young woman of Vietnamese origin, Ève-Mary Thaï Lac.

In the third riding, Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean (held by the Bloquiste Michel Gautier until he stepped down) the Conservatives are leading with 43 % , the Bloc follows with 37%, with the Liberals at 12% and the NDP, 4%.

The polls, done by Unimarketing, have a sample of at least 1000 in each riding.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We have inexplicably had to wait forever for any polling results for these by-elections.

Very interesting numbers, especially in Outremont. You can be sure these numbers will have big implications for each party.

Mary Soderstrom said...

Given the closeness of the race in Outremont at least, doing a proper poll must have been expensive. That is the reason, I imagine, for the dearth of published polls. Have the parties been doing their own? Of course. But were they saying? Of course not.

Mary