On Saturday, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet is expected to spend six hours on the road, to go back and forth from Val-d’Or, the gateway to Quebec’s north, in a riding that has been safely Bloc Québécois blue since it dislodged the NDP in 2019, but now risks turning Liberal red.
That is a lot of time travelling, and Blanchet has little of it left to shore up support in multiple ridings he could lose, but he defended the idea when speaking to journalists on Friday afternoon.
“People in [Abitibi-Baie James-Nunavik-Eeyou] have to understand we attach the same importance to Abitibi as Montreal, the 450 [Greater Montreal Area], the Quebec City region and everywhere,” he said.
Blanchet will have some stops elsewhere after leaving the region — including a couple in that Greater Montreal Area where he has been fending off Liberal advances, but the resource-intensive Val-d’Or trip has surprised political observers.
“I think it’s probably not the best use of their time at this time and stage of the campaign,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University.
“That’s a jaunt,” said Éric Grenier, who founded TheWrit.ca and runs CBC’s Poll Tracker. The aggregator currently has the Bloc on track for 22 seats on Monday, meaning it would lose a third of its representation in the House of Commons.
“It just shows how much they might be playing defence.”
Blanchet pitches himself as alternative to Liberal majority
In the last week of the campaign, Blanchet has publicly admitted he believes Mark Carney and the Liberals will win this election, and urged Quebecers to vote for his party instead, in a bid to keep Carney from a majority and to allow the Bloc to protect the province’s interests.
Something else Blanchet has repeatedly told media covering him this week: He is not simply trying to cling to the seats he already has.
“I’m not playing defence — that’s your analysis, not mine,” he also said to journalists.
In fact, a CBC News analysis of Blanchet’s visits up to this point of the five-week campaign found that he dropped by different ridings a total of 76 times. Forty-nine of those visits were to Bloc-held ridings, meaning the leader has spent 64 per cent of his time in Bloc-blue seats.
More than 30 of those visits were to the 450 area.
Blanchet was back there again on Thursday afternoon, hopping off his campaign bus in Longueuil on Montreal’s South Shore at a local hot dog joint to meet up with another of his incumbents, Denis Trudel, as well as a Bloc challenger in a neighbouring district.
“Which riding am I in?” he asked the two.
Trudel told him it was his.
“Oh no, they’re going to say I’m not in attack mode,” Blanchet replied with a smile, eyeing the media.
It is not as if he has not gone into offence at all in the region. Blanchet visited nearby Châteauguay-Les Jardins-de-Napierville three times since March 23, including on Friday evening, to buoy Patrick O’Hara, a BQ candidate who only lost to the Liberals by 12 votes in 2021.
“For a large segment of Quebecers, for 30 years, in different moments, being at home means being with the Bloc Québécois,” Blanchet said to assembled patrons at a bar there to watch the Habs hockey playoff, as he and O’Hara stood side by side in Montreal Canadiens jerseys emblazoned with their names.
“He actually does his grocery shopping in Châteauguay on the way home,” O’Hara had earlier said of Blanchet to reporters, explaining the leader has made himself visible between elections. O’Hara knocked on 1,204 doors last weekend alone, he said.
He is up against star Liberal candidate Nathalie Provost, the École Polytechnique shooting massacre survivor-turned-gun control advocate. She became the centre of media attention during the campaign’s first week, when Carney mispronounced her last name and confused the Polytechnique mass killing with another at Montreal’s Concordia University years later.
Carney apologized for the errors, and Provost stood by him. It was one of several Quebec-centred gaffes the Liberal leader made during the early days, but it has not dislodged his party from the top of opinion polls in the province.
Béland said the Liberals clamped down on those mistakes as the campaign went on, removing an opportunity for Blanchet to capitalize on them.
Late-game support from a popular provincial political figure
With the campaign almost over, Blanchet received a high-profile endorsement from the leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.
In a blistering letter published on social media Thursday afternoon, St-Pierre Plamondon called Carney an existential threat to Quebec, tore into the Liberals for their immigration policies and the deficits they have run under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, as well as their stated intent to challenge two controversial pieces of Quebec legislation — the secularism and language-protection laws — in court.
“Let’s take stock of the danger they represent for Quebec before giving them a majority government and a blank cheque,” St-Pierre Plamondon said.
“Achieving Quebec’s independence is a question of Quebec’s linguistic and cultural survival,” he went on to say, before encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Blanchet.
That question of the province’s sovereignty has taken a back seat in the BQ’s campaign, which has mentioned the idea in its platform, but has not otherwise made it a large focus.
Blanchet, who has said he would collaborate with Carney in a minority government, found a way to reconcile that with St-Pierre Plamondon’s sterner language.
“Canada will pick Mark Carney as its prime minister. I can change nothing from that, even if there were 45 MPs from the Bloc. I can change nothing from that. So we have to collaborate,” he said, while welcoming the PQ leader’s endorsement.
St-Pierre Plamondon is a popular figure in Quebec. Provincial opinion polls earlier this spring suggested he would form a majority government if a provincial election were held at this time.
“It could help him a bit,” Grenier said, referring to undecided soft nationalist voters in Quebec, who may be swayed by his words.
But he said a showing of 20 to 25 seats would still be a “disappointing result” for the Bloc come Monday.
Béland, though, recalled the lesson learned by Quebec Premier François Legault. Popular himself in 2021, Legault called on Quebecers to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada.
“You know what happened,” he said, referring to how they largely turned to the Liberals and the Bloc instead.
However, he added that though 25 MPs would indeed be a drop for the Bloc, there is a consolation prize.
“If it’s a minority Parliament, and they have 25 seats, and they have the balance of power, I think they will be very happy.”
