Aiming high

The West End Chronicle reports on the NDP's plans in Quebec for the next federal election. And while the party's goals and targets may not be quite the ones which would be expected, it looks like Thomas Mulcair and company are looking to pose a serious challenge to the other national parties:

Mulcair, a longtime resident of Beaconsfield and former provincial Liberal Minister of Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks, said this was just the beginning for his new party in Quebec.

"We are going to win between six and 12 seats in Quebec," he said, adding that he expects the West Island candidates for the NDP will put up a fierce fight come next election. In Lac St. Louis riding, represented by Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia since 2004, the NDP's candidate will again be Daniel Quinn. As for the Pierrefonds-Dollard riding, Mulcair could not say who would be running for the NDP yet, but he promised it was "a well-known West Islander."...

Despite a traditionally overwhelmingly Liberal-voting population, Mulcair said that West Islanders are ready for change. "The area has a history of following its own beat," he said, pointing out that Conservative MP Gerry Wiener won in Pierrefonds-Dollard in 1984.

At first glance, neither of the additional ridings discussed in the article looks to be among the NDP's most obvious opportunities.

Remember that based on polling from last year, the most readily accessible pool of potential NDP voters consists of current Bloc supporters - which would presumably mean a focus on ridings where the Bloc's existing vote could make a substantial difference in the outcome, not to mention an all-out attack on the Bloc generally. And that formula seems to have been an integral part of the NDP's victory in Outremont, where the Bloc tumbled from a close second in 2006 to a distant third in 2007.

But Lac-Saint-Louis and Pierrefonds-Dollard don't fit that mould in the least. In both ridings, the NDP and the Bloc fought each other for third place in 2006 - with the NDP beating out the Bloc by four points in the former, and the Bloc winning out by just under five in the latter.

More importantly, in both cases even the combined NDP/Bloc vote would have finished third behind the Libs and the Cons. Which means that in planning for a "fierce fight" in these two ridings, the NDP's focus seems to be squarely on taking votes away from the other national parties, rather than on hoping for a Bloc meltdown to send new votes into the Dippers' camp.

Of course, that strategy will carry some risks - particularly in ridings where the NDP has two parties ahead of it and a significant amount of ground to make up. But it should be clear from Outremont that the other parties underestimate the NDP at their own peril. And if the NDP is sufficiently well-organized to give the national parties a run for their money in Lac-Saint-Louis and Pierrefonds-Dollard, then that should indeed only be the beginning of the party's Quebec successes.