by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

• In spite of all unique scenarios envisioned for Canada's future, Montreal and its surroundings are expected to clock in as usual with the usual federalist-separatist split, with the Bloc big in the east and off-island franco-burbia while the centre-west of Montreal looks Liberal red. The riding most buzzed about is Outremont, where media personality and Martin Quebec lieutenant Jean Lapierre looks wobbly against the 33-year-old ethical-investment guy François Rebello, who has been gladhanding on buses and at the metro and, according to one poll, has a 42 to 35 per cent lead in the riding. Unfortunately, the riding also includes another half, the more anglo/allo Mile-End and Côte-des-Neiges. In a chat with Election Notebook, Rebello, the son of an Indian immigrant, leaned heavily on the old ethnics-are-finally-warming-up-to-separatism. This week Lapierre refused two more invitations to debate Rebello, who uses the term "arrogant" to describe the Liberal party.

• Montreal's Gay Chamber of Commerce held a debate on gay issues last Wednesday, June 16, in which local candidates from four parties tossed around the issues. Election Notebook couldn't make it due to other pressing commitments but we can tell you all parties but the Conservatives have come out in favour of gay marriage. Those curious for more scuttlebutt on local gay issues related to the federal election can ring the Chamber at 522-1885.

• A Web site called Optical Recognition Objectives (www.gabitus.com /eng/analogia/2.html) boasts that it can find the celebrity you most look like. So we pumped our four leaders in and voilà, their matchups: Paul Martin was judged to most resemble Orlando Bloom and Michael Shumacher. Stephen Harper matched up with Jackie Chan, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Zinedine Zidane. Jack Layton was a ringer for Rutger Hauer, Scott Baio and Arnold Schwarzenegger while Gilles Duceppe was said to look like John Lithgow, Ralph Fiennes and Ed Norton.

• Join the Tories if you wanna get drunk, join the Liberals if you wanna get laid, join the NDP if you want to be handed fat stacks of policy papers, according to the old joke we never tire of repeating. But now that the NDP's dark years are over, some believe it can now again hold the balance of power. Others are skeptical, but the large-eared NDP strategy guy Jamey Heath is taking a rock-hard stance on the importance of a New Democrat vote. "The NDP is in no need of Viagra because it is far from impotent," he said to reporters last week. The NDP's best-ever result came under Broadbent in 1988 with 43 seats, and the NDP has worked with Liberal minorities under PMs Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau in 1963, 1965 and 1972. Current polls suggest that Layton's NDP are looking at about 25 seats, which the pointyheaded number boys note wouldn't be enough to combine with a Liberal 115-120 to hit the required 155 seats needed to form a majority.

• So how does this minority government thing work? Even if the Conservatives get slightly more seats than the Liberals, Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson may offer the Liberals the first crack at forming a government, thanks to a 1925 precedent when the GG let the incumbent Liberals do just that. Some point out that minority governments get stuff done - Medicare, equalization payments to the poorer provinces and the Canada Pension Plan were all done under coalitions. Others point out that, during the '70s when the Trudeau Liberals ruled either under a minority government or threat of one, spending and debt went nuts. Still others rebut that such debt-making was a global trend as governments tried to buy their way out of the '70s economic crises. The economic bad times were blamed largely on the creation of the OPEC oil cartel, outsourcing of industrial production and the ensuing unemployment and high interest rates.

• Perhaps the oddest bedfellows of a minority government would be the Conservatives and the Bloc, a courtship that has started with the Man in the Showercap openly stating his terms: no changes to the abortion law or cutbacks in subsidies to Quebec industry. Duceppe might've forgot Harper has long backed the partition of Quebec in the event of separation, a policy that sends separatists into spasmodic fits of rage. It's also entirely possible that both parties won't get together. Often in such times parties sit on the sidelines and hope somebody else starts a coalition that flops.