Marois now leading the Liberal candidate by 70 votes.
Now only 4 votes ahead!
And now trailing by 60 votes!
Fatima Houda-Pepin, the woman who quit the Liberals this year over the party’s stance on Head Scarves, has lost her seat. Welcome to irrelevancy (you could have done much better work inside the tent).
She sounded very bitter in her interview with CTV.
Léo Bureau-Blouin, one of the leaders of the 2012 Quebec student protests, has lost his Laval-des-Rapides seat to the Liberals.
64 when you take the President/Speaker into account. Looks like they’re holding at 70, which is a tight majority, but a majority.
Françoise David for Québec Solidaire now calling for a PR voting system - you’d like her, Brain Glutton!
So, what is this “Quebec Solidaire” and how did it do in the election?
Now Marois is leading by 200! Quite a topsy-turvey battle in a traditional safe PQ seat.
Honest sovereigntists, who aren’t afraid to campaign on sovereignty, unlike the PQ.
They’re currently leading in 3 seats out of 125, having earned about 7% in popular vote province-wide.
Also worth noting that they’re fairly left-wing.
Marois’ seat is still too close to call. It changes from momet to moment; two minutes ago she was winning, now Caroline Simard is leading, and so it goes. The overall result, though, is pretty much the end of her political career, I would think. She campaigned disastrously.
CAQ will end a few seats up from where they were before, but still the bronze medal.
Simard is up by 407 votes as I write this, but who knows? Two minutes from now, Marois may be up by 160.
Rick, I think you’re correct with your “end of her political career” assessment. She ran a campaign that could be used as a textbook case of what not to do: bring in high-profile business people who hijack the campaign, fail to rein in associates who make outlandish statements (Muslims and swimming pools), and state facts that would be beyond her control (“There will be no borders and Quebec will seek a seat at the Bank of Canada.”)
I think the best Marois could do now would be to graciously retire from politics, and let the PQ elect a new leader.
Global is calling the seat for the Liberal candidate, who’s now leading by over a thousand votes with only four polling stations to be heard from.
It’s gratifying to see the Quebec Charter of Values die the early death that it deserves. It’s still disappointing to see the PQ get as many votes as they did after introducing such a blatantly bigoted bill, though.
Looks like we’re correct, Rick. From the National Post:
Bah-bye Pauline. Good riddance and fuck off. Bah-bye.
I know that we’re all supposed to be gracious, and I’ve seen the various players thanking Marois for her service etc, but someone with her education who shows her level of support for bigotry, xenophobia and lack of worldliness, IMHO does not deserve grace. In some respects I think that she may be our version of Sarah Palin. The charter of values is an obscenity and so many people associated with it in the media only demonstrated ignorance, hate and fear. Jeanette Bertrand’s swimming pool-and-Muslim tale and the Pineault-Caron family’s testimony about their trip to Turkey and Morocco (which clearly had nothing to do with Quebec but was allowed by the hearings anyway) say it all. Those two events alone should have had the PQ slinking away in shame and embarrassment.
Had Pauline Marois won a majority the amount of damage that could have been done to Quebec is staggering and who knows what the PQ would have done vis a vis human rights if they had been unfettered. Though bill 60 would have applied to the public sector the PQ was also encouraging the private sector to voluntarily apply the same standards.
I am an Anglophone who, because of a 30 year military career, have lived in a number of different places in Canada, including Montreal 20 years ago. Though I’ve occasionally seen such bigotry, fear and hate expressed by private citizens, I’ve never before seen such views officially professed by a government until the PQ rolled this out.
That there was actually a significant amount of support for this is mind-boggling and I can only hope that with increasing urbanization, education and internet access this mindset will lose support in Quebec. I hope we never see the likes of her again.