Election Notebook

Liberals surge, Marois has non-regrets and the ADQ’s suburban stronghold collapses

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

• First, some numbers. A CROP-La Presse poll published on Saturday found that, far from fading, Jean Charest’s Liberals are doing pretty well among vote-weary Quebecers. And that is thanks in large part to the cratering of Mario Dumont. The ADQ leader, who entered the election as the official head of the opposition, has seen his party’s points drop to a miserable 15 per cent, compared to the Liberals’ 42 per cent and the PQ’s 31. Nine per cent are undecided, which is more than decided Green Party supporters (seven per cent) and lefty Québec solidaire supporters (four per cent). More good news for Charest: Fifty-nine per cent of the electorate say they are satisfied with the government—but 62 per cent of them say they have little or no interest in this election.

• Mea culpa is in this week. First, Mario Dumont faced the music for, essentially, screwing the pooch as an opposition leader. Last year, making much hay of reasonable accommodation and Muslims demanding pork-free pea soup at cabanes à sucre and the like, he swept into the opposition’s leadership with 41 seats—staffed, he admitted this weekend in his hometown of Rivière du Loup, by amateurs who didn’t know what the hell they were doing. “Those people had another career the day before,” he whined. “They didn’t know parliamentary procedures, they didn’t know the steps to adopt a bill, the rules during question period, the operating rules of their riding offices.” And, he says, since the party’s been more or less a one-man show since its existence, he didn’t have the know-how to lead such a large block. So basically he’s saying that he botched the job once but deserves a second chance. Don’t count on voters trusting him twice.

• Meanwhile, Pauline Marois is backpedalling over comments she made about her stint as health minister in the 1990s, when she presided over the forced retiring of thousands of doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Marois did her best Edith Piaf imitation, saying she had no regrets about gutting the system—until the next day, when she said she wasn’t happy about having to make the cuts but was forced to because the previous Bourassa Liberal government had left them with a ballooning $5.7-billion deficit. Never again, she thundered on Monday, would she make cuts to health (or education, which she also did in the mid-’90s). When he heard Marois’s comments while campaigning in Val d’Or, Charest could barely contain his glee—while feigning outrage—saying her comments are indicative of what to expect from a PQ government. Ouch!

•The design team at La Presse might be accused of being slightly partisan, if the cover page of their Saturday “Plus Forum” section is anything to go by. In a special supplement on the battle for the 450, superimposed on an anonymous subdivision are three airplanes, each adorned with a party’s logo. The PQ is represented by a WWI-era Fokker Dr. I triplane (the same kind of aircraft the Red Baron died in); the ADQ by a WWII-era fighter (make unidentifiable, but perhaps the Focke-Wulf Fw 190); and the Liberals with a sleek F/A-18 Hornet.

• Isabelle Hachey’s report for the daily on the 450 fight—which in 2007 went almost en masse to the ADQ—is one dominated by a feeling of rearguard action. The ADQ’s support is clearly flailing, and Dumont himself has lost a lot of his luster, mostly for his ineffectual stint as opposition leader, and in particular his consistent rejectionist votes on the provincial budget. One former ADQ voter described his behaviour as “adolescent;” another said he was disappointed that he turned to “la petite politique plate” when he threatened to scuttle schoolboard reforms; a third says he was “ashamed” to have voted for him in 2007.

• Martin Cossette, the Liberal candidate for Crémazie, is looking for new digs. On early Tuesday morning, his Ahuntsic office burned down, leaving his campaign and a dozen others homeless. The Montreal fire brigade is currently investigating, especially since, the CBC reports, the building “has a reputation as an occasional drug den.” The building super said “people often smoke drugs in the basement” (which drugs exactly remains unknown) but Cossette says he had no idea. He pledges to continue his campaign from another location