At least six candidates are vying for the New Democratic Party nomination in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Westmount, showing just how far the NDP has come since the days when it scrambled to recruit anyone with a pulse to carry the orange banner in Quebec.
Among those seeking the nod are a high-profile Montreal city councillor (Peter McQueen), a well-known ex-journalist and social activist (Sue Montgomery) and the former head of Montreal's biggest homeless shelter (James Hughes).
NDG-Westmount is a new riding that comprises roughly half of the old Westmount-Ville-Marie and half of the defunct NDG-Lachine. The NDP took NDG-Lachine in the 2011 Orange Wave that saw the party capture 59 of Quebec's then-75 seats. (The province now has 78 seats.) The Liberal incumbent in Westmount-Ville-Marie, Marc Garneau, survived the wave, but his majority in the once-Grit bastion shrank to 642 votes from more than 9,000 in 2008. The NDP wants to finish the job by beating Mr. Garneau in NDG-Westmount on Oct. 19.
The NDP is used to playing offence in Quebec. It's less familiar with playing defence, though that is what it must now do in the province that forms its political base. The party's 2011 Quebec breakthrough showed just how little riding candidates matter when the wind is at your back. It's still unclear how the wind will blow in Quebec this time.
Using data from the Canadian Election Study, a group of political scientists led by Patrick Fournier of the University of Montreal examined the factors that led to the 2011 Orange Wave. None was more important than the affection Quebeckers felt toward Jack Layton. The then-NDP leader's appearance on the television talk show Tout le monde en parle, a month before the election, unleashed the Laytonmania that saw NDP support rise 30 percentage points in 30 days.
Post-election surveys found that almost 36 per cent of Quebec voters who chose the NDP named Mr. Layton as the main reason for their choice – a higher proportion than for any other party leader anywhere in the country. It also outstripped the 25 per cent of NDP supporters outside Quebec who cited Mr. Layton as the main factor behind their vote.
The Bloc Québécois's coup de grâce was arguably self-inflicted. It went into a free fall after leader Gilles Duceppe joined his Parti Québécois counterpart at a PQ convention in an attempt to unite nationalists behind the Bloc. It had the opposite effect, leading to a spike in media coverage focusing on sovereignty that turned off all but hard-core separatists. Indeed, fully 38 per cent of Quebeckers who voted NDP said they favoured sovereignty. "That so many sovereigntists were willing to vote for the federalist NDP indicates that the national question was no longer their overriding motivation," Prof. Fournier and his co-authors conclude.
The NDP won over about one-third of those who voted for the Bloc in 2008. It also picked off a third of those who had voted Liberal and a quarter of Conservative supporters from the previous election. It won two-thirds of new voters, ending with 43 per cent of the overall vote in Quebec in 2011.
Maintaining this coalition of soft and hard nationalists, urban progressives, disaffected Liberals and Layton enthusiasts will be a huge challenge for NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. He enjoys Quebeckers' respect, but not their love. How many who turned out for le bon Jack will do so for Mr. Mulcair? No one has any idea how deep NDP support really runs in a province given to voting on a whim.
It helps that Mr. Duceppe is struggling to articulate the Bloc's raison d'être and that the anti-Conservative vote has, for now, coalesced around the NDP. But Mr. Mulcair's mixed signals on the Energy East pipeline (a non-starter among Quebec progressives and unpopular over all) and history as an arch-federalist Liberal MNA could provide the Bloc with an opening. And the Tories seem poised to gain a few seats at the NDP's expense, given the concentration of their rising support in ridings north and south of Quebec City.
And what of NDP Class of 2011? Only one – MP Alexandre Boulerice – is deemed skilled enough to speak regularly for the party. It's likely no accident that the others are rarely seen, much less heard. That may or may not matter, depending on how the wind blows in 2015.
Konrad Yakabuski