Free-fall

Chantal Hebert writes about the September 17 Quebec by-elections. And while I'm not sure what's behind some of the conclusions, it looks like the Libs may be in even bigger trouble in Quebec than most pundits would have thought:

Nine months into Stéphane Dion's leadership, the number of safe Liberal seats in Quebec is continuing to shrink.

With a set of by-elections only two weeks away, the Liberals are in a battle for third place with the NDP in two of the three ridings at play while they are fighting for their lives in a Montreal seat that they have held for most of the past century...

Outside Montreal, the low Liberal numbers have even become a concern for the sovereignist Bloc Québécois, whose strategists worry about a pooling of federalist votes behind the Conservative contenders.

Those fears are not totally exaggerated. In Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean, Liberal candidate Louise Boulanger spent last week scrambling to explain why she had become a paid-up member of the Conservative party on the occasion of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's visit to the riding in June.

So far, the battles for Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean and Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot are strictly two-way races between the incumbent Bloc and the Conservatives.

Now, I've noted before that the lower-party races in both Saint Hyacinthe-Bagot and Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean figured to be important ones for the longer term. But I'd expected the Libs to regain at least some of the support they lost in the Martin/Chretien feud to push their way into a fight for second with the Cons, rather than declining even further from single-digit results in 2006.

After all, the Libs were the strong second choice in both ridings as recently as 2004 - meaning that they should have a far larger pool of past support to draw from than the NDP. And in Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean in particular, the Libs seemed to have a strong opportunity to capitalize on some serious discontent among previous Con supporters.

Instead, Hebert's column suggests that Boulanger, the Libs' star candidate of the two ridings, has somehow managed to turn a seeming strength (the transfer of herself and other former Con supporters to the Libs) into a weakness. And the Libs as a whole apparently haven't manage to muster anywhere near the organization to position themselves as a primary opponent to the Bloc.

Now, it may be that the Libs are simply focusing their resources on Outremont in order to try to fend off the NDP's challenge there. But the loss of Outremont would be far easier to spin as a single-riding/star candidate aberration if the Libs could show some broader-based party strength through gains in the current Bloc/Con battlegrounds.

Instead, it looks like the Libs may be headed for a worst-case scenario of both losing Outremont and continuing to bleed support - perhaps even falling behind the NDP - in the other two ridings up for grabs. And if that happens, then it wouldn't be surprising to see the Libs continue their decline in the next general election and beyond.