A springtime election in battleground Quebec makes a stop at a cabane à sucre inevitable. So it was no surprise Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet rallied the troops at a sugar shack late this week.
But in a campaign that has threatened to squeeze out the sovereignist party’s pro-Quebec messaging amid Canada’s trade war with the United States, Blanchet has yet to find his sweet spot.
“I’ve been so good,” he mocked his Liberal rival Mark Carney. “Give me a majority!”
“What an idea,” he said. “Four years, one gaffe per day. Donald [Trump], come help me!”
It got the laughs one might expect out of the dozens in the partisan crowd, gathered in Saint-Eustache on Montreal’s North Shore.
The city is part of Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, a federal riding that has been in Bloc hands since 2019. But in both of the last elections, incumbent Luc Desilets won by about five per cent of the vote.
He seemed keenly aware a hat trick is hardly a guarantee.
“If you have time to call [us], we will find something for you to do,” he said to the Bloc supporters, asking them to go out and spread the party’s word.
A pre-campaign plummet in the polls
When the Bloc toppled a Liberal stronghold during a hotly contested byelection in Montreal last September, it had wind in its sails — perhaps even on its way to form Official Opposition as the Liberals cratered in opinion polls, the Conservatives surging and the NDP unable to seize the moment.
But as with the other opposition parties in the House of Commons, the Bloc has proven vulnerable to the events of the last few months: Justin Trudeau’s resignation as Liberal leader, Carney’s arrival as his replacement, President Donald Trump’s inauguration — and the tariffs he brought along.
These headwinds have pushed the Bloc behind the governing party, according to the CBC Poll Tracker. As of the end of Week 1 of the campaign, they could lose up to 10 seats, reducing them to a caucus of 23.
“That’s not something that they expected would happen just a few months ago,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor and the Chair of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.
“They are afraid of the Carney red wave,” he added, comparing this situation to the 2011 election where a Jack Layton-led NDP swept Quebec.
Attempts to capitalize on Carney as a stranger to Quebec
Carney did not help himself in the province in the first week of this campaign.
Referring to one of his star candidates on Montreal’s South Shore, Nathalie Provost, a survivor of the École Polytechnique massacre that targeted women and killed 14 of them in 1989, he mispronounced her name.
He also confused that event, one of the darkest in recent Quebec history, with another mass shooting at Concordia University that took place years later.
Carney apologized, and Provost stood by him.
But the Bloc has been using the incident as a sign Carney does not know the province, one that makes or breaks Liberal dreams to form government.
The Liberals also declined to pay an unprecedented $75,000 fee to participate in a televised, French-language debate which would have been hosted by the private network TVA.
The Bloc insists that, too, is a mistake, and an insult to Quebec.
However, none of this appears to have dislodged Carney from the lead in opinion polls.
“It could become a problem if it becomes a pattern,” said pollster Philippe Fournier, the editor-in-chief of 338 Canada. “But if these are isolated incidents, I think they will be forgotten very fast.”
With no such pattern occurring yet, the Bloc has been keen to remind voters of the events.
TVA cancels its planned French-language debate after Liberal Leader Mark Carney turns down the invite. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet says that if Carney is selling himself as the one to face Trump, he should be brave enough to participate in more than one French-language debate. The CBC’s Raffy Boudjikanian brings us the latest from Quebec City.
On Wednesday, a couple of days after the Liberals balked at the TVA debate, Blanchet held a news conference in Montreal, on the very set where the faceoff would have occurred.
He has also been riffing on what he calls Carney’s gaffes at various stump speeches over the course of the week.
“One has the impression the Liberal leader doesn’t understand the word French,” he said to one gathering on Tuesday, calling the Polytechnique mistake a “dramatic error in comprehension.”
“We couldn’t even figure out if he wanted the debate or not,” he said.
Béland has been observing members of the Bloc repeat this kind of messaging on social media platforms.
“It’s a bit early in the game,” he said, uncertain how the narrative could play out for the rest of the campaign. “Don’t forget, this race started less than a week ago.”
He also pointed out, however, that Blanchet has spent the end of his week campaigning in ridings where the Bloc won in 2021: Desilet’s Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, or Laurentides-Labelle, which includes the Mont-Tremblant ski resort, on Friday.
“They are playing defence,” he noted.
Facing a Liberal opponent who often boasts of his credentials as a former goaltender, Blanchet leaned into the hockey metaphor himself when asked about the polls.
“Stop watching the board. You’re missing a good game on the ice,” he warned.
He also pushed back against the idea he was spending too much time in ridings that are already Bloc blue.
“I will also be campaigning in ridings I intend to win,” he said. “Wait and see as they say, watch me,” he added, echoing a Liberal prime minister of years past.
Bloc no stranger to turning campaigns around
In both 2019 and 2021, the Bloc started behind the Liberals in voter intentions, and then managed to win 32 seats each time, close to half the number up for grabs in Quebec.
On both occasions, it was helped by Quebec identity issues that reared their way into the campaign.
Six years ago, it was the controversy over the Quebec secularism law, which prohibits public-sector workers in positions of authority from displaying overt signs of religious affiliation while on the job. Blanchet sprang to its defence.
In 2021, his party seized on a question posed during the English-language debate asking about why he supported that law and another, then-pending piece of legislation aiming to beef up French-language protection by limiting access to higher education in English, among other measures.
The moderator asked him to help Canadians outside the province “understand why” his party “supports those discriminatory laws.”
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said with 30 days left to go in the campaign, Liberal Leader Mark Carney should not be talking with the president as if his election win is a certainty.
Since then, the Liberals have signed up as intervenors in Superior Court against the secularism law, and on Friday evening, Carney vowed to do the same in the case of the language law.
Blanchet zeroed in on this immediately. “You have to watch Mark Carney closely,” he said on the social media platform X.
Carney currently resides in Ottawa, was born in Fort Smith, N.W.T., and grew up in Edmonton, but that did not stop Blanchet from tying him to Ontario’s capital.
“Is Mr. Trump’s threat becoming an excuse to weaken Quebec identity in the name of a Toronto leader’s Canadian multiculturalism?” He asked.
Whether that question resonates with enough voters to buoy the Bloc will be something both it and the Liberals will no doubt be watching closely.
