One forty-five in the morning. Shouts ring out on Wellington Street in Verdun: the Bloc Québécois has regained the lead. A final turnaround, after an evening of strong emotions, that seals the fate of the LaSalle-Émard-Verdun by-election, held last Monday.
The Liberals, for the most part, had cut their election night party short three hours earlier. “You are the best volunteers in the world!” their candidate, Laura Palestini, told them before leaving the Dillalo Burger restaurant in Ville-Émard, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s press secretary herself.
The mood already suggested bad news for the Liberal Party, which had nevertheless had high hopes of winning a few days, or even hours, earlier. Laura Palestini had declared to the Dutyhalfway through the race, that she didn’t even believe there would be a real three-way race. This prophecy announced by the polls was indeed fulfilled on election day.
The New Democratic Party activists also believed in victory for part of the evening, precisely while the Liberal candidate was giving her speech, inaudible in the joyful hubbub of their gathering. Their opponent’s non-verbal communication made MP Alexandre Boulerice believe that Ms.me Palestini had just conceded victory to them.
By this time, Liberal campaign officials had already noticed that something was amiss when they read the first results, those from the advance polls. The most assiduous Liberal voters did not turn out in as many numbers as expected. This indicated a delay, possibly insurmountable, for the upcoming count. It was shortly after 10 p.m.
A year of misfortune
The fall of the Liberal stronghold of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun to the Bloc Québécois comes at the worst possible time for Justin Trudeau. Bad news is piling up as his minority government’s survival in the fall is no longer assured. During the three visits of the Duty On the ground during the race, no politician could remember a by-election so closely followed.
The genesis of this defeat, however, can be traced back to a sweltering Wednesday morning in July last year. The prime minister showed up in the Governor General’s garden in Ottawa with a list of new ministers who were supposed to provide a “clear vision” for his government.
Justin Trudeau had previously announced to four of his ministers that their cabinet adventure was over. Among them was Quebec Justice Minister and MP for LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, David Lametti.
The Liberal leader never really explained why Mr. Lametti fell out of favour. The latter did not provide much more than a passionate plea for changing the Constitution, delivered on his last day in Ottawa. The resigning elected official called for an end to the preemptive use of the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a strategy used by Quebec to legally armour its recent laws on French.
The fate was sealed: a by-election was inevitable to fill his seat in Parliament. Winter passed, then spring, then summer: the Prime Minister waited until the last possible moment to launch the campaign in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun.
The Liberal team had begun preparing for an open nomination contest, which is the norm in that party. But the premier chose this moment to break with tradition. He called a municipal councillor in LaSalle, Laura Palestini. “Honoured” by the call, as she would later describe it to the Dutyshe launches herself as a candidate, angering other aspiring candidates.
The machine worked
The Liberal government did everything it could to save LaSalle-Émard-Verdun. A review of the Duty shows that at least 18 ministers, 14 MPs and the Prime Minister himself devoted their time to the southwest neighbourhoods of Montreal alongside their candidate. Some went there several times.
Liberal activists were also there. Hundreds of them passed through the Liberal office in Verdun, which was targeted by an annoying daily pro-Palestinian demonstration. Nearly 500 volunteers were present in the final days of the campaign, several sources in the Liberal Party confirmed.
The volunteer’s task is divided into two parts. First, it consists of identifying supporters, during door-to-door days or by telephone, and entering data about them into the “liberalist” party’s database, on the MiniVAN application on their phone. On election day, the entire organization begins to “get out the vote”, that is, convince these supporters to go and vote.
This crucial operation would have gone well among the Liberals. “The exit vote was the most complete I have seen. Everyone [identifié comme libéral] got hassled!” confided a member of the organization who requested anonymity to speak more freely. However, this was not enough to garner the 248 votes that separated them from the victorious Bloc Québécois candidate.
According to former Liberal political staffer Jeremy Ghio, this is “the most worrying thing” since the Liberal Party will not be able to deploy such resources in every riding in the next general election. He believes that most Liberal elected officials, those who were elected by a smaller margin than Mr. Lametti in the last election, should now feel threatened.
“I’ve been in situations like this before. The political staff finds itself in a situation where it’s going to be difficult. There’s going to be departures, and the remaining MPs are going to question every decision that’s made,” analyses the man who now works as a director at Tact.
For their part, the Liberals who were crushed after the heartbreaking defeat share the analysis that a large number of their voters simply did not go to the polls. Speculation about the source of their demotivation varies from the personality of the leader, to the summer weather or the perception of the state of the economy, to the growing influence of disinformation on the Internet.
Crossed in front of a parliamentary committee room, Franco-Ontarian Liberal MP Marc Serré remains hopeful that Liberal voters will choose to come out of their homes on the day of the next general election. “They will come out in the general election to block Pierre Poilievre,” he hopes.
The riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was won by the Liberal Party of Canada in 2021 with a lead of 9,869 votes over its closest rival. That’s more than 102 of the 169 ridings won by the party across the country. Far fewer voters turned out to vote Monday than in the last general election, and the LPC was the biggest victim. Voter turnout plummeted from 61 per cent in the last general election to just under 40 per cent in the by-election. Some 11,446 2021 Liberal voters stayed home or, worse, rallied behind another political party.
– With Marco Bélair-Cirino and Félix Pedneault