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Quebeckers vote today in an election that could change the political landscape of the province and cost at least one party leader his job, as well as influence when Prime Minister Stephen Harper calls a federal election.

Polls put the governing Liberals, the Opposition Parti Québécois and the Action Démocratique du Québec in a statistical dead heat, meaning there could be a long night of vote-counting and possibly Quebec's first minority government since 1878.

Will the governing Liberals or the opposition PQ make an eleventh-hour rebound? Are one or the other of the mainline parties going to be buried? Or will Quebec voters flirt with the ADQ but leave it waiting at the altar?

Earlier today, Globe reporters Rhéal Séguin, Tu Thanh Ha and Konrad Yakabuski provided their analysis of the campaign and answered these and other questions from the readers of globeandmail.com. Your questions and their answers appear at the bottom of this page.

Please note that this was a question-and-answer session, not one of our regular one-hour live discussions.

Mr. Séguin is a native of Ontario who has been covering the Quebec National Assembly for almost 20 years. Prior to joining The Globe and Mail, he worked for CBC radio in Quebec and was a radio and television reporter for Société Radio-Canada in Toronto where he covered provincial politics. He has been a journalist since 1979 and is a graduate from York University. He has a Masters degree in political science from Université du Québec è Montréal.

Mr. Ha joined The Globe and Mail nearly 12 years ago. He started at The Globe as a parliamentary reporter in the Ottawa bureau. Before that, he was assigned to the Quebec legislature for The Montreal Gazette from 1991-94.

He has covered two referendums (1992 and 1995), and multiple federal and provincial elections.

Mr. Yakabuski has covered business, politics and culture in Quebec for more than a decade.

Prior to joining the Globe in 1996, he worked as a political reporter at the French-language Le Devoir, following Quebec through the election of the Parti Québécois in 1994, the 1995 referendum on sovereignty and the arrival of Lucien Bouchard as premier in early 1996.

Editor's Note: We will follow the same rules for this Q&A as we do for our normal live discussions. globeandmail.com editors will read and allow or reject each question/comment. Comments/questions may be edited for length or clarity. We will not publish questions/comments that include personal attacks on participants in these discussions, that make false or unsubstantiated allegations, that purport to quote people or reports where the purported quote or fact cannot be easily verified, or questions/comments that include vulgar language or libellous statements. Preference will be given to readers who submit questions/comments using their full name and home town, rather than a pseudonym.

Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: Welcome, gentlemen, to globeandmail.com and thanks for taking some questions today from our readers. Let me start by asking you the big question: The weekend polls seem to suggest a tight race and a possible minority government. Do you sense any last-minute shifts in public opinion? Or are we in for a nail-biter tonight?

Konrad Yakabuski: The weekend Léger and CROP polls each had the Liberals with a six-point lead over the PQ, and the ADQ down a bit from previous polls. (Remeber, the Liberals dominate the non-francophone vote, so their overall number needs to be much higher than the ADQ's or PQ's to actually win.) Couple this with the traditional "ballot box bonus" in favour of the Liberals, and things might not look so bleak for Jean Charest tonight. All that said, this is a three-way race in francophone Quebec and the Liberals are generally in third place. CROP polls in 21 key francophone ridings have shown the PQ's support to be suprising resilient and the ADQ positioned to take ridings that are currently Liberal. Only a true gambler would bet on tonight's final seat count.

Rhéal Séguin: It would be difficult to imagine a last-minute shift that would give Jean Charest a majority government.

Some would even argue that the campaign has done little to shift public opinion. In a Léger poll conducted at the end of January, the Liberals were at 34 per cent, the PQ at 32 per cent and the ADQ at 24 per cent. We saw similar numbers in surveys conducted by Quebec polling firms over the weekend.

This confirms that little will change and that we are in a one of the tightest three-way races ever. Nobody can predict whether the Liberals or the PQ will come up with the most seats to form a minority government.

What is certain is that the ADQ cannot by any stretch of the imagination win enough seats to take power this time.

Mario Dumont's party is not a factor on the island of Montreal. Nor is it player in a number of other regions such as the Abitibi, the Outaouais or Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean.

It's strength is based in Eastern Quebec regions such as Quebec City and Chaudière-Appalaches and stretches along the shores of the Saint Lawrence westbound into many rural communities before picking up some strength in the middle-class suburban belt around Montreal.

This gives the ADQ the potential to win enough seats to stop either one of the other two parties from forming a majority.

The outcome will largely depend on how the vote splits and to whose advantage. There is no modern historical precedent upon which to base any conclusive analysis. The last minority government dates back to 1878 and Quebec has never witnessed so many three-way races in so many ridings.

So we are in for a real nail-biter that may not even have a winner at the end of tonight's vote. We may have to wait for judicial recounts to determine who can form the government.

Tu Thanh Ha: Despite the claims of the Liberals and the PQ campaigns that they were regaining momentum, I noticed no significant change this weekend in the public mood.

Some people might have a final-moment reluctance about voting for a party other than the two leading ones. But the main dynamic of the electorate hasn't changed — we have a population that isn't keen on either Jean Charest or André Boisclair.

There are some factors that don't show up in the polling.

One is the so-called "ballot-box bonus," the historic fact that Liberal support is usually a bit higher than polling figures because it isn't fashionable to admit to a pollster that you vote Liberal. I also wonder too if the ADQ electorate is similarly under-represented in polling.

The other factor is that a high number of people did cast ballots in the advance voting days a week ago. Thanks to their well-oiled organization, the Liberals tend to fare better among those voters and this could have an impact in such a close election.

Despite all of that, it will be a tight, unpredictable contest. Lots of are harder than usual to call because of three-way races, less of the usual federalist-separatist polarization, more impact from regional issues.

Jasmine Francis, Halifax: I would be interested in your analysis of the campaigns run by each of the three main party leaders. Who did well? Who did poorly?

Rhéal Séguin: Charest designed his campaign in anticipation of a polarization along the old sovereignist-federalist lines by using his record on health care and economic development as the springboard towards another victory against the PQ's commitment to hold another referendum on sovereignty.

He realized too late that the ADQ support was much more solid than he anticipated and he had to change strategy and begin targeting Mario Dumont. But his attitude was often contemptuous towards the fledgling ADQ leader and that didn't go over well with many voters.

He lacked the combativeness that had characterized his style of campaigning in the past. He did not perform well in the leader's debate and was taken aback by Dumont's surprise attack where he revealed documents showing the government was aware with problems with the Concorde overpass in Laval that collapsed last September killing five people.

By the time Stephen Harper tabled his budget, giving Quebec $700-million more than it expected, it was too late.

Mr. Charest had difficulty defending the federalist cause against an adversary like the ADQ which is also fighting for more autonomy for the province.

The Liberals panicked and tried to make-up for their broken promise in 2003 to cut income taxes by $1-billion a year by announcing they would use the extra $700-million to reduce income taxes. The move fuelled cynicism towards the government and the move was seen as too little too late for many disgruntled voters.

André Boisclair had a serious leadership problem to contend with. He had criticized his own party's close ties with the labour movement and appeared hesitant on wanting to clearly outline his plan on how a sovereign Quebec could benefit Quebec. By the time the campaign started, his leadership credentials were seriously undermined.

And he had to contend with voter mistrust sparked by his past use of cocaine when he was a cabinet minister. The issue was never raised during the campaign but still appeared to haunt him.

The expectations were low and most PQ members feared the worst. But when the ADQ support started weakening the Liberals' hold on power, it breathed new life into the PQ campaign.

Also, the party attracted 500,000 fewer voters in 2003 than in 1998. If Mr. Boislair could give those voters a reason to come back to the party fold, rather than stay home as they did in 2003, he would have a fighting chance to form at least a minority government. That's when he began to promote the progressive elements of his platform, make amends with labour leaders and emphasize the need to hold a referendum and achieve sovereignty in order to bring back sovereignists to the party.

The PQ needs to get every possible vote in order to win the close three-way races, especially in predominantly francophone ridings. The PQ and ADQ were splitting the francophone vote with the Liberals way back in third place with only 24-per cent of francophones saying they would support Mr. Charest.

To the surprise of a lot of people, Mr. Boisclair fought a strong campaign in the hope that he could beat the Liberals in the fight to form a majority government. If he fails, that could spell the end of his brief tenure as PQ leader.

Mario Dumont ran the most effective campaign, touching on the issues that concerned Quebeckers living outside of Montreal.

He appealed to the middle class with promises to pay $5,200 a year for each child under school age. He promised to abolish costly school boards. He promoted privatized health care and appealed to fundamental Quebec values by arguing that the province should not have to bend over backwards to satisfy all demands from minority religious groups.

More importantly, he attacked the other two parties for failing to take bold measures to help average Quebeckers. He accused the PQ of being too obsessed with holding a referendum on sovereignty and blasted the Liberals for catering to big business interests and bowing to the whim of the rest of Canada.

The strategy worked. The ADQ attracted disgruntled federalists and disillusioned nationalists, becoming a lighting rod for all the grievances that average Quebeckers hold against the Montreal-dominated Liberals and PQ.

Tu Thanh Ha: Some commentators said they didn't recognized Jean Charest, who failed to live up to his reputation as a formidable campaigner. I thought I recognized him as the Charest of the 1998 election, who lacked passion, who struggled to connect with the francophone electorate and who only roused himself too late in campaign and lost to Lucien Bouchard.

André Boisclair's campaign was relatively glitch-free and he was a fast-learner, as he softened up his image as a cold, haughty man. But while expectations were low, he can't escape the fact that he is a gay Montrealer at a time when the key outside-Montreal electorate is turning more conservative. And he was no match for this election's Teflon-campaigner, Mario Dumont.

Dumont was embarrassed by several of his candidates' boorish remarks. He was also at a loss on a TV talk show when the hosts rolled out a blackboard and challenged him to put figures on his platform the way the other two did. He was accused of demagoguery and his platform was mocked. But the man was perfectly positioned. He reflected a certain weariness of an electorate that had seen three decades of alternating Liberal/PQ power and hankered for changes.

Konrad Yakabuski: Mr. Charest ran an uninspired campaign, but it would be wrong to suggest he erred in doing so. The Liberals have a formidable organization and if their internal polls and focus groups told them that a large enough portion of voters were looking for stability or continuity, it's not surprising they would go with a kind of "The Land is Strong" campaign. Remember that was Pierre Trudeau's slogan in the 1972 campaign. Turns out he did err and barely eked out a minority.

Mr. Boisclair ran the most consisent campaign, and in that sense he earned a lot of respect and probably quite a few second looks from voters who may have earlier written him off.

Mr. Dumont, what can you say, was the undisputed star of the campaign. For better or worse, he's the kind of politician some voters can get excited about. The same cannot be said of the other two.

Donalda Williams Clogg of Hudson, Que., and Dennis Choptiany of Markham, Ont. have questions on the same theme. First, what do you expect will be the impact of Mr. Harper's intervention in the Quebec election? Will it possibly giving the PQ an advantage? Second, what are the implications at the federal level of his actions? Will Harper most likely gain or lose support in Quebec?

Tu Thanh Ha: One of the one hand, I would say that Mr. Harper's direct, short-term influence has been minimal.

The federal budget did shove a big wad of money towards Quebec but Mr. Charest's proposal to turn that windfall into a tax cut undermined the whole claim that it was a necessary step to help provincial needs in health and education. It made the whole exercise look cynical.

On the other hand, Mr. Harper is coming out of this with a big plus.

Mario Dumont has made it OK again to be publicly conservative in Quebec. For the last three decades, a lot of rural, small-town nationalists have voted for the PQ and, since the 1990s, for the Bloc Québécois. They voted for those two separatist parties because of their views on the national-unity issue.

But they felt constrained by the social-democrat orthodoxy that ruled the PQ and the BQ. Mr. Dumont has broken that mold and opened broad opportunities for the federal Conservatives.

Konrad Yakabuski: Mr. Harper's intervention will have a marginal impact in my view. The overwhelming reaction to his declaration that he wants a federalist government in Quebec City is this: What else do you expect the Prime Minister of Canada to say? If there is outrage, it is mostly feigned (as in Mr. Charest's case) or same-old, same-old (as in Mr. Boisclair's case). Blackmail? After 40 years of this kind of debate, I'm not sure Quebeckers pay much attention to the hyperbole.

Rhéal Séguin: Stephen Harper's name won't be on the ballot box. But his presence in this campaign has dominated the agenda.

Whether by giving Quebec a voice at UNESCO, recognzing Quebec as a nation within Canada or his latest attempt to solve the fiscal imbalance, the Conservatives have driven Mr. Charest's national unity agenda from the beginning. Charest's gamble was that Quebeckers would be seduced by the new open federalism in Ottawa and re-elect the Liberals to continue to promote that change.

But Harper's move also reinforced Mario Dumont's call for greater provincial autonomy, allowing the ADQ to project Mr. Charest as a man with no vision for Quebec's role within Canada.

As the ADQ grew in strength, this gave the PQ the outside chance of forming a minority government — with Mr. Harper's intervention accomplishing just the opposite of what he had set out to do.

But in the end the Conservatives may be the big winners. Their base of support in Quebec is similar to the ADQ's The Conservatives won eight of their 10 seats in a region that will likely be swept by the ADQ and Harper can hope to ride the coattails of the ADQ's success by working in the same ridings Mr. Dumont has a chance of winning.

Even if the PQ forms a minority government, Harper knows that it cannot hold a referendum unless the ADQ supports it and Mr. Dumont has said from the outset he has no interest in supporting another vote on sovereignty.

So Mr. Harper may see tonight's result as a major boost to the Conservatives' chances of undermining the Bloc Québécois by focusing on the same social conservative vote that will have allowed the ADQ to make a major breakthrough in tonight's election.

R.M., Regina: I am very concerned about the pattern of both the former federal Liberal government and now the Harper Conservative government who seem to feel that the best way to secure support from the people of Quebec is through giving them more federal money. More money won't stop Quebeckers from voting "yes" in a referendum and simply walking away with the cheque and the victory. Will it?

Konrad Yakabuski: To the extent that an increase in federal transfers further increases Quebec's dependence on the rest of Canada, then, yes, Mr. Harper's approach will prevent some of Quebeckers from voting Yes if there is another referendum. The last time around, in 1995, the federal government was on the verge of bankruptcy and transfers to the provinces were being slashed by then Finance Minister Paul Martin. Sovereigntists could use Ottawa's financial straits as an argument in favour of separation. Now, Quebeckers are faced with a very rich federal government, so it is a disincentive to separate.

Tu Thanh Ha: In the short term, this election is a victory for federalism.

The PQ is in danger of sinking down to historical lows it hasn't touched in three decades. The party no longer has a monopoly on the francophone nationalist vote because more people are turning to Mario Dumont's ADQ.

There is a perception that there is a government in Ottawa that is more sensitive to Quebec. It doesn't have to give large amounts of money. Even symbolic gestures by Mr. Harper have garnered him goodwill in Quebec.

The danger is further down the road. The PQ is convinced that eventually people will realize that the ADQ's third-way approach leads to a dead end, that Ottawa can't deliver and that the people of Quebec will eventually have to choose between the status quo and secession.

Craig Scott, the "Republic of Newfoundland": If Charest loses this election and the PQ gains control, don't you think it is time to change tactics in Ottawa? I believe that it is time to take the gloves off and tell Quebeckers how it is going to be if they decide to have a referendum and choose to separate. I think that kind of approach would be a rude awakening for the people of Quebec and a refreshing change for the rest of the country, which is getting tired of having the separation gun held to our heads all the time. Rob B. from Milton, Ont., asks a variant on that question: Is there any other civilized Western nation that has been so obsessed with one portion of its country for the past 40 years as Canada has been with Quebec?

Tu Thanh Ha: I believe your tough-love approach has already taken place.

Many nationalist francophones will reel off a list of purported grievances that unfolded in the post-referendum years after Stéphane Dion became Jean Chrétien's Intergovernmental Affairs Minister é the Plan B, the Clarity Act, etc.

It drove in the idea that Quebec secession would be a messy process and could explain why there is no rush by the population to engage in a referendum.

But if a lot of Quebeckers don't feel in a rush to head into another referendum, it doesn't mean this has extinguished their sense of nationhood.

People here speak another language. This means they listen to other opinion-makers. They feel different — both from anglophones but also from France. And as long as they form a minority amid a sea of English-speakers, they will feel that their identity and culture is threatened and can be preserved only by obtaining more control, more power — whether by seeking them from Ottawa or through secession.

Konrad Yakabuski: To Craig Scott: Federalist leaders have been "taking the gloves off" forever and it has only made Quebeckers more determined to demand more -- more recognition, more money, more power. Pierre Trudeau threatened Quebeckers they'd lose their pensions if they voted Yes, and no one has forgotten or forgiven him for that. Jean Chrétien took a similar tough-love approach in the 1995 referendum and almost lost. Standing up to Quebec makes a politician popular in the rest of Canada. Not so much, here.

To Rob B : Ask José Luis Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain. He's been bending over backwards to accomodate Catalonians with more decentralization and autonomy. Ask Tony Blair, who gave Scotland more autonomy and now risks seeing the separatists win at least a plurality of seats in the Scotish Parliament. Look at Belgium,where "two nations" have shared a state with lots of conflict. Quebec's place within Canada has been a dominant theme in Canadian politics, but we're not the only country to go through this. And although it is sometimes frustrating for Canadians who wonder if it will ever end (it won't), we have always dealt our differences in ways that generally earn us respect on the world stage.

Philip Van Bergen, Hashima, Japan: Two questions: Has the Quebec public gotten over the sponsorship scandal? Why is Quebec so worried about multiculturalism and the changing face of the Rest of Canada?

Tu Thanh Ha: Yes, the sponsorship scandal is history as the Bloc Québécois learned the hard way in last year's federal election when it not longer got traction on that issue.

The sponsorship scandal artificially boosted the popularity of both the BQ and the PQ and I got a sense that [Bloc Leader Gilles] Duceppe's campaign in 2006 was blindsided when the Conservatives made a breakthrough.

Mr. Duceppe spent a lot of time in Montreal trying to make inroads by courting the ethnic vote and fielding minority candidates. But in fact, the battle was in the hinterland where the Bloc had taken the francophone vote for granted. The voters punished the Liberals — but by voting Conservative.

As for your second question, you might be alluding to either of two issues.

If you asking about the criticism that the Quebec separatist/nationalist movement often makes about Canadian multiculturalism, yes indeed such criticism exists. There is a perception that, by emphasizing other minorities, the rest of Canada has diluted the importance of francophone Quebeckers as a key, historical player in Canadian history, denying them their special status as members of one of Canada's founding nations.

Diversity has also been a factor in this election. Like other Western societies, Quebec is facing challenges trying to manage an increasingly diverse wave of immigration.

There has been an influx of newcomers since the 1970s and it has mostly been free of major frictions. The so-called Children of Bill 101, who went to French school but also speak English and their parents' native language, are pretty well integrated.

But Quebec, which underwent the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, is still trying to figure out exactly where religion fits in the public space — which is why there has been controversy over how to accommodate more recent waves of newcomers, especially devout Muslims and Hassidic Jews whose religious practices are more unbending and public.

The backlash over some isolated cases of accommodation for those religious minorities has played into the increase in popularity of Mario Dumont and the ADQ, and has forced Mr. Charest and Mr. Boisclair to adopt tougher stands against accommodations too.

Konrad Yakabuski: Sponsorship scandal? What sponsorship scandal? There are still those in Quebec who consider "official multiculturalism" was a policy adopted by Pierre Trudeau in order to reduce the Québécois to just another cultural minority in the Canadian mosaic.

Quebeckers have always had a preference for a melting pot model of integration, since they form a French-speaking minority in North America.

Rhéal Séguin: The sponsorship scandal will continue to linger in Quebeckers mind for years to come. Events keep popping up to remind them of the sorry episode in the country's history.

In a few days, the Chief Electoral Officer will release a report on the lobby group Options Canada and the alleged illegal use of federal funds to defeat the separatists in the 1995 referendum. The report will likely awaken the ghost of the Gomery Commission and fuel PQ arguments that the last referendum was not won fair-and-square by the federalists. ,/P>

This is one issue that will continue to overshadow the Liberal party of Canada's attempts at rebuilding its base in Quebec.

As for multiculturalism, Quebeckers have shown that when immigrants arrive in Quebec and adapt to the French language, the level of integration is no different here then elsewhere in the country.

However, francophone Quebeckers constitute a minority in North America and the survival of their language and culture remains a constant concern. And this can often lead to tensions when the cultural minorities follow their natural instinct to integrate the North American-dominated English language.

In Montreal, the integration into an increasingly multicultural society has been met with success. But as you head into regions where few cultural communities are present, then the lack of contact and integration has often led to misunderstandings, which have become an issue in this campaign and will likely to continue to dominate debate over the coming years.

Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: Gentlemen, thank you again for taking the time today to share your analysis of the campaign and your insights into what might happen today and in the future. Much appreciated.