After struggling to take off, Bruno Marchand’s campaign for mayor of Quebec finally got the boost it was hoping for this week, a poll placing him tied with Jean-François Gosselin. However, with the approach of the ballot, the latter also has a new card in his game.
Thursday morning, The Journal of Quebec released a Léger poll attributing 22% of the voting intentions to Bruno Marchand, from the strong and proud Quebec party. A jump of 9 points since June, which places him tied with Mr. Gosselin (Quebec 21) and less than 10 percentage points of the leader, Marie-Josée Savard, of the party of the same name (31%). Jean Rousseau and Jackie Smith follow with respectively 5% and 4% of the support.
Until recently, the Marie-Josée Savard Team hadn’t really been worried. Heir to the legacy of an archipopular mayor, Mme Savard led a campaign focused on competence and continuity.
A reassuring image that his underperformance in the Radio-Canada debate last week came to shake.
In Quebec, even those who did not listen to the debate heard about his score of 4 out of 10 in the quiz organized by the station to measure the candidates’ knowledge of the city.
It remained to be seen who would benefit from his disappointment. This week, the other four candidates have all criticized her for her lack of transparency because she did not make public a correspondence between the City and the Ministry of the Environment on the impact of the tram in the Montcalm district.
Throughout the week, she repeated that the distribution of the documents was not in her purview, until the story ended on Wednesday, when the City held a press conference on the subject.
“What was so complicated about sharing this info?” »Asked Bruno Marchand from the forecourt of the town hall, just after the press conference. “Can we be transparent?” Give the info to citizens? “
Earlier in the week, Mr. Marchand also attacked head-on the light rail project that Mr. Gosselin proposes to launch to replace the streetcar. “According to optimistic calculations, the VALSE metro project would be delivered in 2031, that is to say almost four years after the deadlines foreseen for the tramway. Mr. Gosselin is therefore not right to say that his project will be delivered on time, ”he said. Information since validated by the project director of the structuring network Daniel Genest.
In refusal of the tram
But Jean-François Gosselin inherited a new angle of attack on Thursday when The Journal of Quebec revealed that the streetcar was going to cost $ 600 million more than expected. “Quebec 21 is the only party that can stop this tram project there,” he said at the end of a radio debate Thursday at FM-93.
Since the start of the campaign, his opponents had spoken little of VALSE, one way like any other to question its credibility. In tackling it, Mr. Marchand sought to impose himself in place of Mr. Gosselin as the main alternative to Mr.me Savard.
The process has not turned out to be so easy since Mr. Gosselin has gained aplomb since the 2017 campaign. With the exception of his awkward exit on a possible fourth link, he has demonstrated a good knowledge of the files of the City during the campaign, which earned it an 8 out of 10 in the famous Radio-Canada quiz.
He also espoused more center-left causes (public transport, social housing) in the hope of rallying a larger pool of supporters. The presence of a climate-skeptic candidate in its ranks (Claude Duplessis in Saint-Louis – Sillery), however, reminded us that he had held the same kind of speech in 2017.
Some links have also been severed. Like his association with the station CHOI-FM where, as we wrote in June, the Jeff Fillion and company have coldly welcomed his light rail project and are not campaigning for him, especially since he has not denounced in the fall the decision of Régis Labeaume not to buy advertising from them. Jeff Fillion has already said that he considered that Bruno Marchand “would make a good mayor”.
Radio X was welcoming the candidates for yet another debate on Thursday. Only this week, they took part in at least four games in public.
One of the most fruitful questions was asked during a debate at CKIA on Wednesday morning, when host Marjorie Champagne asked them for which proposal they had had the greatest “political courage”.
In the order, Bruno Marchand spoke of his commitment to reducing social inequalities. Marie-Josée Savard, she maintained that real courage consisted in making commitments that we were able to “bring to port”.
Jackie Smith subsequently spoke of his promise to reduce the use of cars in the city and to tighten the screws on developers in the area of social housing. Jean-François Gosselin, for his part, maintained that the 50-plus commitments he had made were not courageous but were “logical” because they met the needs of citizens. Finally, Mr. Rousseau spoke of his promise to subject developers to new obligations regarding tree planting and public parks.
Difficult to assess the effect of these debates on the vote. At Cegep Limoilou, candidate Jean Rousseau stood out by directly addressing students. While all of the contestants stayed quietly behind their desks, he took the initiative to walk to the center of the stage whenever he was given the floor.
Enjoying a certain success of esteem for the quality of his interventions, the advisor of Cap-aux-Diamants has stagnated since the beginning at around 5% of support. Barring an unexpected turn, the question now is whether he will be able to keep his seat thanks to his running mate.
The question also arises for Jackie Smith, of the Transition Quebec party, who will also have the opportunity to take the seat of his running mate in Limoilou if the latter is elected. For the young party she created, it would already be a notable victory.