Elections | QS wants to diversify its list of candidates

(Quebec) Mayor, doctors, lawyers: to broaden its electorate, Québec solidaire is stepping out of its traditional pool of activists to recruit candidates.

Charles Lecavalier
The Press

“It’s not necessarily a refocusing. It is a desire to broaden our electorate. And to expand our electorate, you have to have people on the starting line who allow us to talk to new parts of the population that we had more difficulty talking to before. That was our approach,” explains the parliamentary leader of Québec solidaire (QS), Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, in an interview with The Press.

He wants to break the image of an urban party and wants to better reach voters in the region or from cultural minorities. He will present his recruits to party members at the QS National Council to be held Saturday in Montreal.

Several new candidates

Over the past few months, the left-wing party has recruited several figures who do not come from the traditional pool of early activists. The D^res Mélissa Généreux, in Saint-François, and Isabelle Leblanc, in Mont-Royal–Outremont, wanted to wear the colors of the left-wing party. The first is a well-known figure in public health, and the second was until very recently president of the Quebec Doctors group for the public plan.

The mayor of Saint-Camille, Philippe Pagé, will be a candidate in Richmond, in Estrie. A former political aide to PQ Health Minister Réjean Hébert, he is also the executive director of the Fédération de lalève agricole du Québec. Lawyer Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, an immigration specialist, will try to beat the Liberal leader, Dominique Anglade, in Saint-Henri–Sainte-Anne.

This sometimes causes friction within the party. In Maurice-Richard, the members of the party’s coordination committee resigned en bloc following the defeat of Raphaël Rebelo during the investiture meeting. Haroun Bouazzi, vice-president of the Business Development Bank of Canada, will represent QS. He had the support of the co-spokespersons. A former candidate for the party denounced for her part on social networks the “too great electoralism” of QS.

Mr. Nadeau-Dubois sees it as something positive. In 2018, “there was almost no nomination contest because there weren’t that many people who wanted to run for us,” he says. While this year, the “vehicle for people who refuse the vision of François Legault, more and more, it is instinctive that it is Québec solidaire”.

Good for recruiting

“There was a lot more running for the nomination, it generates debate. There are people who win, and people who lose. This is the game of democracy,” he said. He believes that it is possible to “expand the party while remaining respectful and loyal to the activists who have built it for years”, and even derives benefits from it.

A disputed investiture in the riding of Bonaventure, in the Gaspé, “brought the solidarity membership in this riding from 100 members to 800 members,” he said.

Mr. Nadeau-Dubois also points out that several party candidates are still from the militant base and that a balance is respected.

Political scientist Martin Papillon, director of the Center for Research on Policy and Social Development at the University of Montreal, believes that the new wave of QS candidates is the symbol of a certain “political maturity” of a party that is becoming over time “more institutionalized”. “Some criticize it, but by having deputies in the National Assembly, by following the codes of politics, it is a party that is becoming a little more mainstream, without necessarily refocusing from a political point of view. »

Credibility

He explains this recruitment success of QS by the positioning of the party, which has become “de facto the official opposition in several regions, because the PLQ is not a party that succeeds in reaching the Francophone electorate”. Even if this success is not “reflected much in the polls”, people see that it is possible to “get elected under the banner of QS elsewhere than on the Plateau Mont-Royal”.

Lecturer at the University of Sherbrooke, political scientist Emmanuel Choquette also sees a progression of Québec solidaire. “It will give him credibility. It’s a virtuous circle. Because the party is more present, and its credibility is increasingly strong, it attracts more and more candidates from outside the militant circle. It thus gains credibility and broadens its spectrum of voters,” he says.

Even if this risks creating “friction in the circles of the militants of the first hour”, who will perhaps find that the left party, by wanting to cast a wider net, is repositioning itself more towards the center of the political spectrum.