Quebec expected to deviate from tradition of supporting one party

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After years of casting protest votes and sitting on the periphery of federal power, Quebec appears set to retake a greater place in the corridors of influence in Ottawa.

The province will veer away from a long-standing tradition of swinging hard for one party, if polls are to be believed, turning it into a more evenly divided, multicoloured puzzle of MPs for all four major parties.

The effect of the partial breakup of Quebec's voting block is that, whoever wins the federal election on Monday, Quebec MPs will likely have the most pull they have had since the dying days of Jean Chrétien's reign in the early 2000s – and perhaps earlier.

The Quebec power vacuum at the federal level actually extends to 1993, when voters turned to the Bloc Québécois and disengaged the province from federal politics despite the presence of a Quebecker as prime minister with a heavy-hitting finance minister also from Quebec, Paul Martin, said Anthony Sayers, a political scientist at the University of Calgary who studies regional representation and federalism.

The NDP surge of 2011 brought Quebeckers back to having a greater overall stake in Ottawa, Prof. Sayers says. The loss of at least some of those ridings to other federal parties in 2015 will put more Quebec MPs at the centre of power, regardless of how the election turns out.

If volatility among Quebec voters is confirmed on Monday, the province will be in play again for federal parties, both as a potential base of expansion but also a potential cause of turmoil.

"The Orange Wave brought Quebeckers partially back in, but this will be a whole new level of engagement. A whole bunch of knights and bishops off the board since 1993 will be back on the board with Quebec at the table," Prof. Sayers said. "There will be a new dynamic that will represent opportunities for the parties and for ambitious individuals, but also could make the prime minister's job of balancing regions more difficult."

With the Liberals and NDP running neck-and-neck in popular support in Quebec, the Conservatives and the Bloc close to each other in the second tier, and with each party holding bastions of strong support, it is hard to predict how the province's 78 seats will be split up.

But divided they will be, as the three national parties share the spoils of the Bloc's broken dominance of the Quebec electoral map from 1993 to 2011.

The Liberals, leading nationally, appear to be making a recovery in Quebec that should give the party more seats there than it has held since 2000 under Mr. Chrétien, when they won 36. A Liberal victory would also put a Quebecker, this time Justin Trudeau, back in the prime minister's chair.

"Chrétien is a different case, because he basically ran the Quebec file. Neither Trudeau nor [Conservative Leader Stephen] Harper could play the role he did. They will have to heed a larger Quebec contingent," Prof. Sayers said. "Mr. Chrétien basically ran roughshod. They will have to defer."

Mr. Trudeau would likely have a few experienced Quebeckers at his disposal, most notably Stéphane Dion and Marc Garneau.

"Even at 20 seats, they would have some good people on hand," said Pierre Martin, a political scientist at the Université de Montréal, who is running a seat projection site for the Journal de Montréal.

Should the Liberals be overtaken by the Conservatives in the final days of the campaign, Mr. Harper could bring two or three times more MPs to Ottawa than the five elected in 2011.

Even though support for the NDP has faded in Quebec, the province will likely still be the centre of the party's power base after election day, with anywhere from 25 to 45 seats. If the party somehow defies polls and expectations with a dramatic comeback win, MPs from the province will have a huge say in government.

Over all, the election should mark a return to greater regional representation around the cabinet table, a principle that has suffered with the paper-thin Conservative caucus, despite repeated efforts to woo Quebeckers.

"It matters because if you have no regional representation for the government, nobody who speaks the language, the government becomes more of an alien entity," Prof. Martin said.

Right now, Quebec representation for the Conservative government is essentially Denis Lebel, the MP from the Lac-Saint-Jean region who has been omnipresent on everything from environmental files to the reconstruction of the Champlain Bridge in Montreal.

"Denis Lebel is not such a bad voice, but he's only one voice," Prof. Martin said.