Quebec Liberal Supporters Comforted by Likely Opposition Status

The announcement of a projection that the Liberals won the main race of this election, to decide who would make up the official opposition, animated a small crowd of about 40 supporters and party workers.

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Liberal supporters who gathered at the Corona Theater on Monday night in St-Henri took comfort in the fact that their party would become the official opposition, even if they were far from coming to power.

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Ten minutes after the polls closed, the major networks announced that it would once again be a majority government of the Coalition Avenir Québec. A few minutes after that, it was announced that the Liberals had won the main race of this campaign, to decide who would make up the official opposition, cheering on the small crowd of about 40 supporters and party workers.

“Dominique, Dominique, Dominique,” they chanted.

“It was not a surprise,” said former finance minister Carlos Leitão, who opted not to stand in this election but served as the Liberals’ campaign chairman.

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“Still, it looks like we will be able to retain official opposition status, which is important because it will allow us to take the next four years to rebuild and refocus the Liberal Party. So we are still strong in our strongholds, our base in Montreal.

“Now we need to bridge with the rest of Quebec, and we have four years to do it.”

The Liberals’ message that they would be the economics party of the 21st century, bringing together economic projects focused on environmental issues, failed to resonate with the population, Leitão said. He also admitted that the first few weeks of the Liberal campaign, during which the party was unable to find a complete list of 125 candidates, were “catastrophic” and damaged the party’s ability to get his message across.

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Supporters were few and far between at the start of the night at the Corona Theatre, at the Saint-Henri—Sainte-Anne riding of Liberal leader Dominique Anglade. The Liberals rented a very small space for their official campaign soiree.

“His vision of society reflects my values, in the sense that he wants an open, inclusive society that sees all citizens as equals, whether they are Muslims, new immigrants or French Canadians,” said Michel Fontaine, who came from Sorel- Tracy to support Anglade. “That’s what I like about the Liberal Party.”

A supporter of the Parti Québécois in the past, Fontaine said he switched to the Liberals about 10 years ago because he did not like the form of nationalist identity politics that was emerging in the PQ. Founder René Lévesque would not have appreciated it either, he said, since Lévesque espoused a civic nationalism open to all peoples. CAQ leader François Legault is pushing a quieter form of identity politics, Fontaine said, but one that has become more open in recent weeks.

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Yseult Jean-Marie, a teacher and longtime Liberal Party supporter who is of color and came out in support of Anglade last night, said Legault’s message was clear to citizens like her: “It makes us feel like we don’t belong.” she said. “Hurts.”

Standing because there were no chairs available, Jean-Marie said she came from her home in Rosemont “because Mme Anglade shares the same values ​​as me, of including people.”

Polls indicated support for the Liberals barely budged since the start of the campaign, with the CAQ falling five points to 38 per cent support from the Liberals’ 16 per cent in the most recent polls. Liberal party members hoped the negative publicity surrounding CAQ statements demonizing immigrants in the final week of the campaign would draw some voters into their fold.

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Anglade changed the theme of his campaign from the economy to the promise that the Liberals were the only party that would speak for all Quebecers and bring unity, compared to what he called the division of Legault’s rhetoric.

With the election results showing that the Liberal campaign has lost much of its historic dominance, the question now is how the party can win back support, particularly among Francophone voters, of whom only seven percent said they planned to vote for Liberals in this election.

The party was saved from annihilation in part because it retains enough of a cavalcade stronghold, mainly in West Montreal thanks to anglophone and allophone supporters, to guarantee enough seats to maintain the party’s official status. The PQ, which has been decimated by the loss of support for sovereignty, was not so lucky, with initial projections predicting three seats for the party. The 2018 elections, in which the PQ won just 10 seats, marked the first time since 1973 that the party did not form a government or serve as an official opposition. Monday night’s results were bound to be even worse.

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“It’s a crisis for Liberals,” said Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, in the days before the election. “Maybe it’s not as bad as PQ, but it’s a long-term crisis.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Liberals were bombarded with TV and radio interviews and visits to safe, not-so-safe, no-chance rides in Montreal, Quebec City, the eastern townships. and the South Coast. Many of those places had a very similar story: They had been liberal strongholds for years, if not decades, then moved over to the CWC by slim or wide margins in 2018, and for the most part it looked like they would do it again this time. .

Even a one-time sure bet like La Pinière, Gaétan Barrette’s former South Shore cavalcade, won handily by the Liberals in 2018, was not a sure thing, even though the area is home to multicultural communities like Brossard.

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