by PATRICK LEJTENYI

There’s a provincial byelection underway. Still reading? Good. Because the byelection is being run in the Montreal riding of Ste-Marie-St-Jacques, which constitutes Old Montreal, Chinatown, the Gay Village, much of the Plateau and Centre-Sud east to Frontenac—a riding that contains the highest-profile tourism destination in the city, its hipster headquarters and major poverty, drug and prostitution problems below the hill.

It also marks the first official foray into provincial politics by Québec solidaire, the left-leaning, soft nationalist party created by

the Union des forces progressistes–Option citoyenne fusion last month. The party’s representative in the election, Manon Massé, also says hers is the first campaign in Quebec history to front an openly gay candidate in an inaugural contest (PQ leader André Boisclair only came out in 2000, almost 11 years after he was first elected as a fresh-faced 23-year-old in Gouin).

For Massé, 42, the campaign is the culmination of 20 years of social work and activism. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been involved in politics,” she tells the Mirror. “But it’s the first time I’ve ever been involved in electoral politics.”

Walking blues

Her platform is based on three main pillars—homophobia, poverty and the environment. If elected, she says, she’ll push a program that would introduce a “national policy” of “zero-tolerance” anti-discrimination lessons in the province’s schools, a move she says is long overdue.

“It’s an idea that’s been given very little priority” by previous governments, she says, and the delay has had a major effect on the lives of hundreds of Quebecers. “When you’re called things like fag, tapette or butch, it can lead to suicide, to dropping out of school or long-term mental health problems. Discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace has been outlawed for 30 years, but the problem among individuals remain.” She also wants training for teachers who will intervene if they see schoolyard taunts based on perceived sexual orientation.

Other ideas include indexing social assistance against inflation, rejigging the number of tax brackets to make the tax base more “progressive,” easing the tax burden on households by raising taxes on the private sector, more social housing and more boarding rooms for single people, and ditching the planned transformation of Notre-Dame East into an expressway, favouring an “urban boulevard” more amenable to locals.

One more idea: increasing the minimum wage to $10 an hour. “That would make it equivalent to what it was in 1975,” she says. “People have been losing their purchasing power terribly.”

In conversation, Massé grows more animated the more she speaks. Get her talking about traffic congestion in the East End, for example, and she’ll list off numbers to prove her point.

“There are 42,000 people living in this riding, and an additional 25,000 come here to work every day—this is a quartier de déversement [a spillage neighbourhood]!” she says. “We have 20,000 to 30,000 cars coming into downtown every day. The people who live here are being penalized.” True to the party’s green roots, she wants to improve public transit, as well as bike and walking paths.

“Thousands of people walk to work every day,” she says, “and it’s not always because they like the exercise.”

Trust me, I’m a politician

Massé is a familiar figure on the franco left. She was one of Option citoyenne’s original founders, following the underwhelming response by the then péquiste government to the 2000 women’s march, which drew hundreds of thousands of people onto streets worldwide to call for more attention to issues like pay equity and domestic violence. Like many other lefties, the increasing disconnect between the PQ establishment and the grassroots groups the party once relied on was disenchanting enough for her to look for an alternative.

On leave from the Centre des femmes de Laval, Massé says she wants to get people excited about politics again. There’s a cynicism in the riding left open by the retirement of the riding’s former PQ rep, André Boulerice, and she wants “the people to reapproriate politics.”

Doing the door-to-door thing, she says she noticed that while locals are “extremely politicized, which was a nice surprise,” she has to overcome their instinctive mistrust of politicians. She points to a year-old Léger Marketing poll that shows politicians rank 20th out of 20 professions for trustworthiness. “I think that’s terrible,” says Massé. “But when you get people like Boisclair saying they’re altermondialiste and écologiste, what do you expect?”