Sunday, June 21, 2009

Coderre's outreach to adéquistes successful?

Interesting development here I think, with former ADQ MNA Claude Morin winning the Liberal nomination for Beauce for the next election. http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.enbeauce.com%2Fdetail-actualite.asp%3FID%3D13604&sl=fr&tl=en&history_state0==

This is what Coderre said when named Quebec LT:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2009/03/16/mtl-coderre-adq-0316.html

Michael Ignatieff's Quebec lieutenant says he is wooing disaffected sovereigntists and members of the stumbling Action democratique du Québec to the federal Liberal fold for the next election.
Liberal MP Denis Coderre said Monday that he has had talks with "fatigued" sovereigntists about possibly running for the Liberals in the next federal election.


Thanks to Maxime Bernier's very high local popularity (winning 62% of the vote in 2008, which I believe was the highest % received by any candidate from any party in 2008 in Quebec) a general consensus has emerged that even with the Tories polling low teens-high single digits in Quebec, he would be able to hold on to his seat.

The seat is also interesting for being a rare federalist vs. federalist fight. Since the emergence of the BQ in the 1993 elections, I believe Beauce, Pontiac, and Outremont are the only ridings to been held by different federalist parties without ever being held by the BQ. When Bernier won the seat in 2006, he did so largely thanks to a massive collapse in the Liberal vote in that riding, with the Grit vote sliding from 19,592 votes in 2004 to less than 5,000 in 2006, as Beauce, along with Pontiac, were the only Liberal held seats the Tories gained in the 2006 breakthrough. The BQ vote has moved around as well, and Bernier has managed to slice into traditional BQ supporters, but nowhere near to the extent that he has been able to grab Liberal votes. It will be interesting to see if a former ADQ man can not only ride the rising tide of Liberal votes in the Quebec, but can slice into the base small-c conservative vote. Pre-1993, the riding often featured tight contests between the Liberals and whichever conservative party happened to be dominant in Quebec at the time, with the Socreds and Liberals flipping holding the seat back and forth from 1962-1984, until the PC's became the dominant conservative force in the riding, winning it with Gillies Bernier, the father of Mad Max.

Let's see if any more ex-ADQ figures come out of the dark and present themselves for the federal Liberals.

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