Canada: Suburban Montreal's Majority Makers

How The Ring Around Montreal Will Decide The Majority

I wrote in my Canadian election preview that whether Justin Trudeau gets his majority government or not would run through Quebec, and that holds. The Bloc surge in 2019 was concentrated, mostly, in the places which feel separate - mostly, separate from Montreal. The thing about places like Longueuil and Montarville and even Chambly is that they’re not Montreal, in any physical or legal sense, but they’re also reliant on Montreal. Unsurprisingly, the further away you get from the island of Montreal, the safer the Bloc seats mostly get, which didn’t use to be true. In 2019, the Bloc raised their vote province wide, but in all their former east island seats, their vote went up - but by much less than their province wide increase. In much the same way, get further out from the island, and the Bloc vote started to surge much more than their provincial increase. And on the South Shore and around the island, the battle for the majority will be won or lost, and it might come down not to the best policy ideas, but to a sense of identity.

My mother was born in Chambly and lived there for the first few years of her life, until her father’s work started to be successful enough that the family was able to move onto the island - but at no point did my family think of themselves as anything but Montrealers. They were Anglos, and my grandfather worked at the famous Sun Life Building right downtown. They were Montrealers, and just because they were living in Chambly for a little while didn’t change that fact. For them, Chambly - an Eastern Township off the island - wasn’t anything but an extension of the City, and that’s how they viewed these sorts of places. The reason it is worth noting they were Anglos is that their relationship to that place is going to be inextricably linked to that fact - as is the fact that these are places not defined by anything except what they aren’t.

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What is the defining feature of Shefford, which was won by just 1.5% in 2019 by the Bloc, or Montarville, which they won by a shade over 7%? These are communities that are defined by their geography - they are towns of their own nature, but also they are places defined by their relationship to Montreal. And in that sense, there is a duality to these seats, because the francophone majority of Quebec has always had an adversarial relationship with Montreal (and, to a lesser degree, Quebec City). You see it even in something like the 2000 election, where the Bloc won a slight majority of seats while coming in 2nd in the popular vote - the Liberals won Montreal and Quebec City, they won some of the commuter areas, and the Bloc won everything else. The further from the two cities a riding was, almost uniformly, the Bloc did worse. Even as the Bloc did win more east island seats, that pattern held, and the thing about the east island is it feels much more a coherent part of Montreal than it did when I first started going to the city as a child.

Montreal is an almost overwhelming experience, in some ways - a city where trilingual citizens aren’t exactly the norm, but they certainly aren’t the exception, and a city that has had to understand the contradictions of it to make it the great city it is. It is a city I love dearly, and it is a city that I understand very well, because I understand it through my own contradictions - of being gay, but not being flamboyant, of trying to find what being myself is, and not just a caricature. Montreal is a hard city to explain to the world, because it is a city that you have to know to understand. It is the greatest place on earth, and I’ll go to my grave thinking that. But it is also a place of controversy, an island of Englishness in a sea of French, a place that isn’t seen really as “Quebec”, as Parizeau’s famous blaming of “money and the ethnic vote” for the 1995 referendum loss shows. Montreal and its denizens aren’t always considered Quebecers, and that distinction matters. And the ripple effect to those reliant on Montreal, but not in the city, and whether they vote for the party of Montreal, or the party of the rest of Quebec, could in some ways decide the majority.

The Bloc were the (defacto) Federal wing of the Parti Quebecois for decades, founded to fight for Quebec independence in Ottawa. But now, with the death of the PQ, the Bloc have pivoted to being the protectors of the current CAQ government in Quebec City, the defenders of provincial jurisdiction and antagonists of the overreaching Liberals. The problem for the Bloc is they are the party of a Quebec unity, of the non-Montreal majority of the province, while the Liberals are trying to slide past this by presenting a message of national unity in the face of the pandemic. The Bloc and the Liberals don’t disagree on much, in terms of policies (aside from constitutional questions), but what they do disagree on is whether or not success amongst the non-Quebecois matters or not.

The Bloc are trying to keep the status quo - Montreal versus “real” Quebec - while the Liberals are trying to get rid of the distinctions and the fighting that that historical distinction has accompanied. If the Liberals can succeed, then they will be able to expand the red from the island out - to the northern suburbs above Laval, to the eastern suburban townships, and to the South Shore. If they fail to win those seats, it will be in large part because these places have decided that they are Quebecois first, and not interested in the city that sits near. The starker that distinction, the better the Bloc will be. If the Liberals succeed at eliding that historical fight, then they will probably get their majority government. The fight for Quebec, and for the country, relies on it.