Parti Québécois | Candidate Pierre-Luc Brillant calls for a reflection on the place of polls

Just invested as the Parti Québécois candidate in the riding of Rosemont, in Montreal, the actor Pierre-Luc Brillant believes that it is time to review our relationship to political polls. The Parti Québécois can surprise, especially if its leader gets enough visibility, he also believes.

Vincent Larin
The Press

Before speaking to a packed house at the Petite-Côte Community Center, where many party candidates were also present, Thursday evening, Pierre-Luc Brillant said he expected surprises in the next election.

“By dint of talking about polls, it’s as if we were putting it in people’s heads that life is a poll when I was talking to Alexis [Brunelle-]Duceppe (Bloc Québécois MP in the riding of Lac-Saint-Jean), it was at 8% when the [dernières] elections [fédérales] “, he underlined in a press scrum, just before his speech.

According to him, the polls do not take into account certain local dynamics. “We should stop raising this as scientific proof that such a candidate is at the bottom of the scale when it may not be true and in many cases experience has proven to us that it was not true” , he added.

“In Rosemont, I’m going to make a prediction: Pierre-Luc will win,” said the leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre-Plammondon, during his turn to speak.

Pierre-Luc Brillant also believes that his leader could be able to surprise and that the party’s poor results in the polls are mainly due to the lack of visibility it had in the media during the pandemic.

Present as an observer at the investiture of Pierre-Luc Brillant, the designer of the Qc125 poll aggregator, Philippe J. Fournier, insisted on defending the analysis of polls, a discipline from which he made his bread and its butter in recent years.

“Information is still information and polls during an election campaign are the only objective, or at least scientific, information we have on the state of the race. The rest is spin “, he insists, using this expression widespread in the political world to designate the narrative that the parties are trying to establish.

The riding of Rosemont was a stronghold of the PQ for a long time until the defeat of the leader of the party, Jean-François Lisée, in the general elections in 2018, at the hands of the solidary Vincent Marissal.

The latter had been elected with 35% of the votes in Rosemont, a lead of 2,500 votes over Jean-François Lisée, who won 28% of the votes.

Born in 1978, Pierre-Luc Brillant began his screen career at an early age. He acted in several films including CRAZY and more recently in The Disappearance of the Fireflies and in No chicane in my cabin.