But Québec Solidaire, the left-wing, strongly principled fourth party, has some excellent candidates. Edith Laperle is one of them. A trade unionist, she'll be running for the third time in the Outremont riding which also include the less toney neighborhoods of Mile End and Côte des Neiges. She got 32 per cent of the vote last fall when Couillard ran in a bye-election, which was a terrific result.
Couillard isn't running in Outremont this time, since he promised to run in the Northern Quebec riding of Roberval during his campaign for the Liberal leadership: the Outremont foray was designed to give him a safe seat after he became leader. He probably should be congratulated on not going back on that promise in order to stay in Outremont, but the fact that he made it in the first place says worlds about his frequently shakey political judgment.
Not that the Liberals aren't aware of the appeal of QS and Ms. Laperle among Outremont voters. It looks like they want to muddy the ideological waters since they're running the sister of Françoise David, the QS co-spokesman and one of two QS members of the National Assembly. As in many political families --think Bob Ray and his brother John during the former's NDP phase, and Daniel and Pierre-Marc Johnson, respectively Liberal and PQ premiers of Quebec--families can see deep divisions.
What will be interesting to watch is how Ms. Laperle, whose face and ideas are now pretty well known in the riding, approaches the campaign. Does she have a chance to win? I'd love to think so.
1 comment:
I certainly hope so. Couillard is running quite a risk by deciding stand in Roberval. While Lac St-Jean is not as historically as conservative as the St-Maurice region (think Duplessis, and later Hérouxville) it is a remote rural region in mid-northern Québec where there are very few people who are not "pure-laine" francophones, except for the Indigenous Innu people. In many countries, appeals to fear of outsiders and the unknown get more of an echo where there are few "foreigners".
I wouldn't have voted Liberal anyway (I'm a founding member of QS - attended their founding conference at Université de Montréal, in that very riding) but I'm deeply disappointed by Couillard's nasty opening salvo about how much he "detests" the current government. I always thought he was trying to portray himself as an educated gentleman; he came off as a blustering bully.
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