Si la tendance se maintient, the Bloc Québécois will win a majority of Quebec seats in the next election for the seventh consecutive time. The next election will also be Gilles Duceppe’s sixth as head of the party, making him the undisputed greybeard of the five federal leaders.
With Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton spending some time outside Ottawa on much-publicized tours, the Bloc Leader has also been on the road, visiting some of the regions in the province that will be hotly contested whenever Canadians go to the polls.
An analysis of the 75 ridings in Quebec indicates that less than a dozen will likely be the primary focus of the Bloc’s next election campaign.
The sovereigntist party has 25 “fortress” ridings that they are virtually assured to retain. More than two-thirds of them are in the Bloc’s core region of support between Montreal and Quebec City. The suburbs north and south of Montreal vote solidly Bloc, with levels of support running at about or well over 50 per cent in the last three elections.
There are another 18 ridings the Bloc currently holds that can be considered to be secure. Half of these are in the Bloc’s heartland, while there are three in the regions around Quebec City and the Saguenay and another three in Montreal and Laval.
This gives the Bloc a hard floor of 25 seats, but the party is in a strong position considering that 43 of the 47 seats they currently hold can be considered safe.
The real campaigning will take place in the 11 ridings that are on the bubble, and if we assume the Bloc’s objective is to win 55 seats, or one better than the party’s best results in 1993 and 2004, Mr. Duceppe will have to carry most of these to have a shot at attaining it.
There are five Bloc ridings that can be considered vulnerable, three of which are particularly interesting. First among these is the eastern Quebec riding of Haute-Gaspésie–La Mitis–Matane – Matapédia, primarily because it could topple before the next election. Long-time MP Jean-Yves Roy resigned his seat in the fall, and unless the writ drops this spring a by-election will have to take place. The riding was won in 2008 by a slim margin, as the Bloc beat out the Liberal candidate by 37.5 to 35.6 per cent. Jean-François Fortin, a local mayor, will be carrying the Bloc banner next time around. Nancy Charest will be running again for the Liberals, while the Conservatives have also put up a good candidate.
Ahuntsic, a riding on the island of Montreal, is also vulnerable. Maria Mourani took the riding by only 423 votes in 2008 against former Liberal MP Eleni Bakopanos, who will not be running again and has been replaced by Noushig Eloyan, a well-known city councillor. The last three elections in Ahuntsic went down to the wire and it is likely to be another close race.
The third Bloc riding to watch is Gatineau, which was won by Richard Nadeau in 2008. This was the closest three-way race in the country, as the Bloc won the riding with 29.2 per cent of the vote, beating out the NDP’s Françoise Boivin by 3.1 points. The Liberals, at 25.3 per cent support, were not far behind. The pair are set to face-off against each other again, and the permutations of such a close three-way race make the outcome completely unpredictable.
Brome–Missisquoi and Jeanne–Le Ber will also be ones to watch, as the margin was just a little over two points in both cases.
While playing defence in these five ridings, the Bloc Québécois will also likely be targeting six ridings which they have a good chance to take in the next election.
