NDG, Westmount-St.Louis, Outremont

By P.A.Sévigny, August 29th, 2012

 With only days to go before the people go to the polls, Outremont Liberal Raymond Bachand told The Suburban that it always vital that a solid majority of people  get up, get out and go vote for the candidate of their choice. Citing the previous election’s numbers, Bachand is grateful that an overwhelming majority of constituents voted for him, but he still would like to see more people showing up at the polls. As it was Sunday morning and the advance polls were already open, Bachand’s office was full of volunteers who were working the phones while others were waiting to take the elderly and the disabled to the polls.
In NDG, it’s not much different as every effort was made to get anyone and everyone out to the advance polls. In what has long been considered one of the safest seats in the province, several of Liberal candidate Kathleen Weil’s advisers have already told The Suburban that they are still taking nothing for granted. Even as the odds favor Weil who is widely recognized as an excellent minister and a great constituency MNA who makes a point of being a visible presence in the riding, the C.A.Q.’s Angely Pacis is working hard to press the flesh to pick up the kind of popular support she needs. With less than a week to go before the next election, the PQ’s Olivier Sirard is now known as NDG’s “invisible man” while Québec Solidaire’s David Mandel is now being forced to explain that he is, in fact, the QS candidate in NDG and not Marc Mandel as indicated on the party’s posters under his photograph. As the leader of Québec’s Green Party, Claude Sabourin was seen handing out flyers at assorted NDG Artsweek events but, as usual, nobody is taking the Greens seriously when at least three separate political parties keep up the argument as to who are the real separatists and who truly represents Quebec’s hopes for its own independence.  
While local residents can still consider Westmount to be a safe Liberal seat, it was still a bit strange to see that the issue of Quebec’s independence once again dominated the Westmount candidates’ debate which occurred last week in Westmount’s venerable Victoria Hall. Six of the seven candidates bothered to show up for the event — only the PQ’s Marc-André Bahl figured he had better things to do than to meet and greet the voting public. Of the six candidates who took their place on the stage, two (three if you include the absent PQ candidate) were avowed separatists while another two maintained their party’s ambiguous “whatever” approach to the question. While Westmount resident Pierre Allard, the district’s only independent candidate, maintained his principled libertarian’s  approach to the question of Québec’s future political destiny, only the PLQ’s Geoff Kelley stood up for Canada and for Quebec’s place within the federation. Poised, polite and dressed in what some might consider the height of Montreal’s Plateau-borne retro chic, Québec Solidaire’s Mélissa Desjardins managed to hold her own right up to the end of the debate when she crashed and burned after she took a cheap shot at the Liberal incumbent Jacques Chagnon who could not be present at the debate. Following Desjardins’ attack on Chagnon for his absence and for refusing to meet the community, the West Island’s Geoff Kelley rose to defend his colleague after which he was once again forced to explain to Desjardins that as the speaker of Québec’s National Assembly, Chagnon must avoid any kind of partisan politics as a matter of legal principle which is why he [Kelley] had to take his place during the debate. While more than a few of the province’s so-called “big issues” were discussed during the debate, Westmount’s Georges Matta did manage to have Kelley promise that he would discuss the ongoing problem of Westmount’s proposed sound barrier with both Chagnon and a number of officials in Québec’s MTQ (Ministère des Transports du Québec).
During these final days of the election campaign, all three Liberal offices are reporting a number of incidents in which hundreds of campaign posters are defaced or simply disappear within hours after they were put up on lampposts throughout the borough. n