quebec election - 04.09.2012

How does the Quebec election results affect the likelihood of Mulcair's provincial NDP party being successful in the next election? While I recognize that a week in politics is an eternity and, in the case of Quebec, one day is an eternity (witness the last federal election), perhaps some of you who are a lot more knowledgable about Quebec might hazard an educated guess on the effects of tonight's vote on the NDP provincially? As an outsider, the divided scene provincially suggests that a provincial NDP has the potential to do very well by attracting anglo federalists who are left-wing or simply fed up with Liberal corruption, as well as the potential of attracting soft nationalists with the appropriate platform and an attractive leader. The multiplicity of parties suggests to me that a large number of seats could be won with a relatively low percentage of the vote compared to federal or other provincial elections. However, my hypothesis is based of a rather limited understanding of Quebec. 

Publié le 05 septembre 2012 à 00h06 | Mis à jour le 05 septembre 2012 à 00h49

ATTENTAT PENDANT LE DISCOURS DE MAROIS

Agrandir

PHOTO OLIVIER PONTBRIAND, LA PRESSE

http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/elections-quebec-2012/201209/05/01-457...

Montréal) Deux personnes reposent présentement dans un état critique alors qu'un attentat a brutalement mis fin au discours que livrait la nouvelle première ministre du Québec, Pauline Marois, au Métropolis.

Un homme armé âgé de 50 ans a été arrêté par le Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) derrière la salle où se rassemblaient les militants péquistes, a confirmé le porte-parole du SPVM Dany Richer.

Autour de minuit, l'homme est entré à l'intérieur du Métropolis et a fait feu sur deux personnes. Il aurait également mis le feu près d'une des portes à l'arrière de la scène, sur laquelle se tenait Mme Marois.

Boom Boom wrote:

Any anglos that leave Quebec because of the PQ win - good fucking riddance!

Final Result:

PQ: 54 seats - 32%
Lib: 50 seats - 31%
CAQ: 19 seats - 27%
QS: 2 seats - 6%

Great result for Quebec and Canada IMHO.

The PQ won't be able to push any of its 'silly' ideas according to opinion polls within Quebec. I frankly can't imagine how they will govern without collapsing within 12 months.

I can even see the Libs and CAQ making a pact to form government - if not now, within a year. Something akin to the federal NDP/Lib/BQ pact after Harper was elected in 2008 without the BQ stigma.

Blink blink. With a 4-seat and 0.80% margin, I think Marois knows quite well that she does not have anything resembling a resounding mandate.

You know... there is another route to an LPQ/CAQ ruling coalition. If a few PQ MNAs defected to the CAQ or Liberals, they would no longer even have the most seats.

jerrym wrote:

How does the Quebec election results affect the likelihood of Mulcair's provincial NDP party being successful in the next election? While I recognize that a week in politics is an eternity and, in the case of Quebec, one day is an eternity (witness the last federal election), perhaps some of you who are a lot more knowledgable about Quebec might hazard an educated guess on the effects of tonight's vote on the NDP provincially? As an outsider, the divided scene provincially suggests that a provincial NDP has the potential to do very well by attracting anglo federalists who are left-wing or simply fed up with Liberal corruption, as well as the potential of attracting soft nationalists with the appropriate platform and an attractive leader. The multiplicity of parties suggests to me that a large number of seats could be won with a relatively low percentage of the vote compared to federal or other provincial elections. However, my hypothesis is based of a rather limited understanding of Quebec. 

I think this is a less beneficial outcome for the provincial NDP than if the LPQ and CAQ were reversed. The Liberals did far better seat-wise than expected, as a few percentage points spread over the entire province made a huge difference in terms of seats, relative to the CAQ. People keep talking about a potential LPQ/CAQ coalition; a LPQ minority with CAQ support is more likely, but probably not until the Liberals regroup, whether under a new Leader or not.

47% of the vote for Amir - not too shabby!

Mercier

Number of polling stations: 128 / 128

Candidates / Political affiliation / Valid votes / Percentage of valid ballots (%) / Majority

Khadir, Amir / Q.S. / 14 164 / 46,73 % / 7 026

Poirier,Jean / P.Q. / 7 138 / 23,55 %

Pâquet, Anne / P.L.Q./Q.L.P. / 4 091 / 13,50 %

Boncompain, Julie / C.A.Q.-É.F.L. / 3 336 / 11,01 %

Kovacs, David / P.V.Q./G.P.Q. / 859 / 2,83 %

Payne, Nic / O.N. / 722 / 2,38 %

Centrist wrote:

Boom Boom wrote:

Any anglos that leave Quebec because of the PQ win - good fucking riddance!

Final Result: PQ: 54 seats - 32% Lib: 50 seats - 31% CAQ: 19 seats - 27% QS: 2 seats - 6% Great result for Quebec and Canada IMHO. The PQ won't be able to push any of its 'silly' ideas according to opinion polls within Quebec. I frankly can't imagine how they will govern without collapsing within 12 months. I can even see the Libs and CAQ making a pact to form government - if not now, within a year. Something akin to the federal NDP/Lib/BQ pact after Harper was elected in 2008 without the BQ stigma.

with Charest gone, much of their former antipathy will vanish,

so PLQ and CAQ could be making eyes at each other this fall ...

It is hard to call the result a "mandate" for the PQ. 

It received just 31.9% of the vote, actually down from 35.2% in 2008.

It gained a net of THREE seats through the b vagaries of the FPTP system.

Can anyone point to a government that took power with such a small percentage of the popular vote?

Alhtough I hold no brief for Charest or his party I do not see any constitutional problem with him holding on to power and asking the National Assembly for a vote of confidence. This is exactly what happened after the 1925 federal election. The Conservatives got the most seats but not a majority. Makenzie King, like Charest, lost his own seat, but refused to resign. (Another paralell is tht the Liberals were facing a massive corruption scandal which resulted in the Beauharnois Inquiry)

Has Charest yet said anything that can be interpreted as ruling out a similar approach?

North Report, indeed that was a classy photo of Amir Khadir and Françoise David, with their respective spouses Nima Machouf (herself a successful Projet Montréal candidate, but she gave up her seat for Richard Bergeron) and François Larose. We can see a bit of Manon Massé and François Saillant behind them.

I was really hoping for a win by Andrés Fontecilla - it depended on how the PQ and Lib vote divided. His campaign was great but alas he didn't win. Next time, I hope.

PoliSciStudent wrote:

I saw a tweet from a reporter that Mulcair is saying it will now be much harder to launch a Quebec wing of the party and it may not happen. I don't know if this just means there may not be one for the next election or entirely.

That's my opinion. I think the NDP should just forget about it.

now they tell us, ha:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/04/kelly-mcparland-cancel-th...

Cancel the nervous breakdown

Someone cancel the national outrage, the existential angst, the 19th nervous breakdown. Turns out we won’t be needing it. Here we were, a country full of English Canadians, all fired up and ready to give those Quebec voters a piece of our mind — “Listen, you people, if you think we’re going to sit here and listen to another four years of wailing about how unappreciated you are, you’ve got another think coming” — and they go and spoil it all.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/04/john-moore-pq-victory-is-...

PQ victory is nothing to fear

The rest of Canada should take a breath and get back to whatever it is we were doing Monday. The PQ may be bad news for Quebec but outside of the province there isn’t much to fear. Firstly, it should be remembered that on balance, the PQ runs pretty good governments. Rene Levesque cleaned up Quebec politics with policies on party funding and governance that would be imitated elsewhere in Canada. His government championed education and fostered a burgeoning French speaking business class. He and succeeding PQ premiers including Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard did not spend the province into the ditch. All knew that if they were to nurture the goal of becoming a country they had to manage their affairs like a country.

Wilf Day wrote:

Has no one noticed the Ontario parallel? In 1985 the PCs were four seats ahead of the Liberals, but it didn't matter, the Liberal/NDP Accord voted the PCs out on the first confidence vote, and that was that.

Now that Charest is gone, it's perfectly possible to have either a Liberal/CAQ accord or a coalition. Is Legault so sure of his future that he would scorn the idea? He used to be, but the results were disappointing. It's his decision. Is he thinking about it? Do politicians try to win? 

Another few huge differences:
- The PCs had been in power for decades and lost the popular vote to the Liberals. (PQ did "win" the popular vote albeit very narrowly)
- The Liberal/NDP Accord turfed out a stale government for a new one. (Whereas a PLQ/CAQ accord would reinstate a stale governing party after the voters lost confidence in it)
- Peterson and Rae both won their seats. (No comment necessary)
- The NDP had already established some history of contributing to minority governments in the Davis years. (CAQ has no history, and the ADQ did not do much to stabilize that one minority Assembly) 

This election result should put a nail in the coffin of any separatist who thinks they can achieve sovereignty through ethnic chauvinism. Marois' gambit failed spectacularly. The Liberals practically swept Montreal, the Eastern Townships, and the Outaouais region as the minority communities reacted to her rank racist posturing by coallescing around the Libs, the only choice they really had that would defend them from further discrimination and exclusion. 

"Any anglos that leave Quebec because of the PQ win - good fucking riddance!"

Is this the view of a progressive? It's disgusting. Most of my friends have already left Quebec in the past two decades because they have been effectively shut out of Quebec political and cultural life. There are many more who were frightened by Marois' Marianne Le Pen impression. 

I still don't understand this romantic view that some on the left hold for Quebec nationalism. Like any other nationalism it can adopt positive civic values or very negative and exclusionary ethnic ones. With the evisceration of social democracy everywhere, it is the latter anti-multicultural reaction that is coming to the forefront in almost every country in Europe as well as North America.

Maybe he thinks Leonard Cohen wrote a song about her.

... it's time we began... to laugh, and talk, and .....

ceti wrote:

This election result should put a nail in the coffin of any separatist who thinks they can achieve sovereignty through ethnic chauvinism. Marois' gambit failed spectacularly. The Liberals practically swept Montreal, the Eastern Townships, and the Outaouais region as the minority communities reacted to her rank racist posturing by coallescing around the Libs, the only choice they really had that would defend them from further discrimination and exclusion. 

And it's worth considering how moderate and uncontroversial Legault's CAQ campaign seemed by comparison--remember, we're talking about the ADQ's de facto successors here...

ceti, have you ever heard about national oppression?

I opposed the PQ approach to overcoming it, as did my party, and Amir's speech at our final rally at Marché Maisonneuve centred on an ethnic and inclusive approach to building Québec.

But you are acting as if there were no historical and material basis to the sovereignist movement. And you dare call its exponents "racists" while ignoring the nationalism of the oppressors?

And "separatists"? You are taking us back 40 or 50 years there.

Montreal Gazette: Canada’s voting system distorts outcomes, expert says.

Quote:

Canada’s future hinged on just a few percentage points Tuesday.

With just under 32 per cent of votes cast, the Parti Québécois eked out a narrow victory, winning 54 seats, to 50 for the Liberals, 19 for Coalition Avenir Québec 19 and two for Québec solidaire. The difference between the PQ and the Liberals was 0.7 of a percentage point.

But what if the PQ had won 34 per cent?

The result likely would have been a majority government, giving Premier-elect Pauline Marois a free hand to pursue her party’s sovereignist goals, said Harold Chorney, a professor of political science at Concordia University.

“They could have gone ahead with a referendum, could have gone ahead with trying to wreck the country and they would have had what democratic basis for this? Essentially, a third of the electorate would be enough to justify such radical policies,” Chorney said.

That scenario illustrates why Chorney and many other experts say Canada should adopt a form of proportional representation. . . .

In Quebec, the distortions caused by the current winner-take-all voting system have sometime resulted in a government taking power with fewer votes than its nearest rival, said Matthew Hayday, an associate professor of history at the University of Guelph.

“Quebec is one of the worst provinces in how the first-past-the-post system distorts the popular vote,” he said.

One reason for that is that anglophones and allophones overwhelmingly support the Liberals. Because those groups are concentrated in the Montreal area, their overwhelmingly pro-Liberal vote is under-represented in the overall outcome.

“I think that the fact there is the concentration of linguistic minorities in Quebec in certain regions accentuates and drives home the inequalities and the flaws in our current electoral system, which has an impact on democracy,” Hayday said.

“I think Quebec is the case that really shows just how inequitable it can be because you see just how wide the gap can be between the popular vote and seats in the legislature,” he added.

The big loser in this week’s election was the CAQ, which won only 19 seats even though it was not far behind the other two parties in the popular vote, with 27.06 per cent, Hayday noted. In past elections, the first-past-the post system has put the Liberals at a disadvantage.

In 1994, the PQ swept to power with a 77-seat majority government under Jacques Parizeau, with one-third of a percentage point more votes than the Liberals, Hayday noted.

In 1998, the PQ won a majority under Lucien Bouchard even though the Liberals won the popular vote by one per cent.

One reason Canada has not reformed its voting system either at the provincial or federal level is that winning parties welcome the distortions the system produces, Chorney said.

“Because they’re able to get into power with just 40 per cent of the vote, or 38 per cent sometimes, they like that, obviously,” Chorney said. (He was referring to past federal elections. In this week’s tight three-way race in Quebec, the PQ won with less than 32 per cent.)

“But they have to understand, when it works for them, it’s great, but when it doesn’t, they can be devastated and they can be reduced to a very weak little group of representatives in the assembly or parliament,” he said.

Proportional representation encourages coalitions where adherents to different political ideologies must learn to cooperate, Chorney said.

“It forces politicians who are ‘pur and dur,’ who are very ideologically inclined and stubborn, to accept that they don’t have all the right answers. You have to compromise and listen to other citizens,” he said.

The New Democratic Party and Québec solidaire are strong proponents of PR, also promoted by Fair Vote Canada, a citizen’s group. . . .

What are the chances Quebec will move toward a more representative voting system?

“Well, my old friend John Hotson, a brilliant economist at the University of Waterloo, used to say if you can think about it, then you can bring it into reality. What can be thought about coherently can become real,” Chorney said. “And it’s true.”

I would still say that while the vote share does tell a very bizarre story of how FPTP can give disproportionate results, a parallel story to look at here is the effect that a massive increase in turnout can have on the election results. What are the differences in raw vote numbers?

Liberals lost 4,428 votes.
PQ picked up 254,355 votes.
CAQ picked up (compared to ADQ) 650,833 votes.
QS gained 140,172 votes.
ON conjured up 82,857 votes out of nowhere.

While it would be naive to assume that the nearly-identical number of Liberal votes consisted of the same people (I'm sure a bunch fled the party and a bunch of previous non-voters compensated), it does tell a tale of what can happen when a mass movement of voters with various determinations suddenly become inspired to vote where they didn't before. Everyone but the Liberals benefited from the increased turnout - even though the PQ lost vote share, it still gained voters.

The question is, how do you actually inspire that kind of turnout increase in a place that isn't Quebec? And how do you guide those new voters to your cause? It would seem that even with the CAQ's mediocre bump in seat count, they were truly the ones that pulled in the most new voters.

Well, the rethoric has really gone down since the election, so it is quite possible to have a stable government. The CAQ and the PQ share many of the same objectives and, even if they disagree on the means to achieve these, they should be able to come to compromises. 

In the wake of the Metropolis attack, and after the defeat of the most divisive government Québec has probably ever seen, both parties stand to gain by showing they are civilized and flexible. 

Aristotleded24 wrote:

I have to say I thought it was really classy the way Legault spoke of the victory of Francoise David in his election night speech.

A Facebook-style "like" to that.

I agree, Unionist, there is a basis for some forward movement, esp. against corruption, never popular with voters;

another factor, less hysteria from the federalist Right,

cf. sudden National Post turnaround: now they tell us, ha:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/04/kelly-mcparland-cancel-th...

Cancel the nervous breakdown

Someone cancel the national outrage, the existential angst, the 19th nervous breakdown. Turns out we won’t be needing it. Here we were, a country full of English Canadians, all fired up and ready to give those Quebec voters a piece of our mind — “Listen, you people, if you think we’re going to sit here and listen to another four years of wailing about how unappreciated you are, you’ve got another think coming” — and they go and spoil it all.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/04/john-moore-pq-victory-is-...

PQ victory is nothing to fear

The rest of Canada should take a breath and get back to whatever it is we were doing Monday. The PQ may be bad news for Quebec but outside of the province there isn’t much to fear. Firstly, it should be remembered that on balance, the PQ runs pretty good governments. Rene Levesque cleaned up Quebec politics with policies on party funding and governance that would be imitated elsewhere in Canada. His government championed education and fostered a burgeoning French speaking business class. He and succeeding PQ premiers including Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard did not spend the province into the ditch. All knew that if they were to nurture the goal of becoming a country they had to manage their affairs like a country.

adma wrote:

Maybe it stood out w/Legault because he was the first of the "big three" to make such a statement...

Maybe it also stood out because we are not really used to right-wing politicians being gracious about their opponents and willing to work together across party lines.

Ippurigakko wrote:

Unionst, just remember what Romeo Saganash said something about northern Quebec. He said it make him concerns if quebec leave Canada, there is should something to do else.

 

another thread? i'll looking for it.

Thread suggestion: "Free Ungava!"

Ippurigakko wrote:

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674nunavik_election_turn...

 

28% Lowest voter turnout in Nunavik thats because they cant vote that day sept 4, their name list is missing.

i guess similar federal election 2008.

2008

Eeyou-Nunavik (exlude Baie James) LIB 59%, PQ 19%, QS 8%, IND 7%, ADQ 7%
Baie James PQ 59%, LIB 26%, ADQ 12%, QS 4%, IND 1%
Eeyou LIB 55%, PQ 19%, IND 13%, QS 7%, ADQ 6%
Nunavik LIB 62%, PQ 18%, QS 9%, ADQ 8%, IND 3%

2012

Nunavik LIB 47% (-15), PQ 18% (=), QS 15% (+6), CAQ 11% (+3), ON 6%

I can't help, but wonder how many people are being denied thier vote. Canada's turning into a banana republic when it comes to elections.