Now that the election is over, it’s the perfect time to discuss the parties’ platforms.
It’s not like I could have used that yesterday or anything.
Tag Archives: Quebec politics
Note to Yolande James
Don’t ever make this face again.
The exciting results, live! (as soon as I see them on TV)
Tonight’s election liveblog, in a nutshell:
- Liberals win, ADQ becomes the official opposition after posting huge gains in Quebec City, the Laurentians and the Eastern townships.
- Strong second-place showings in two ridings by Québec solidaire and three by the Greens, all on the island of Montreal.
- The CBC blows a big election call (Jean Charest’s riding) and has to retract itself with a pathetic excuse
And so it begins
The polls have closed, and results are already trickling in from four ridings.
The predictions: Liberals have a small chance of forming a majority, and the PQ has a moderate chance of forming a minority, but the most likely scenario sees a Liberal minority with the PQ in opposition.
The coverage:
TV:
- CTV, CBC, Radio-Canada, TVA, RDI, CPAC, LCN and CTV NewsNet have non-stop election coverage.
- TQS is starting its coverage at 9:30, and is showing a documentary on Valery Fabrikant right now.
- Télé-Quebec is incorporating election coverage into regular programming, with Bazzo on right now and the seat projections on the screen.
- Global is running regular programming and giving updates during commercials and having actual coverage only at 11.
- The National Assembly channel is dead air.
- CNN is updating us on Anna Nicole Smith.
Radio:
- CBC Radio One, Radio Canada (première chaîne), CJAD, 940 News, Info 690 and 98.5 are running election coverage.
- CKAC has regular programming with updates.
Online:
- The Gazette has abdicated its live coverage to Canadian Press, whose servers appear to be crashing under the load.
- Ditto Globe and Mail.
- CBC.ca, as usual, has its comprehensive online election section,
though I can’t find riding-by-riding results. Riding-by-riding results are under “riding profiles”. Hardly intuitive. - Cyberpresse has CP covering the riding results, but is running regular story updates and blog posts.
- Quebecor’s Canoe (Journal, TVA) has an excellent elections website, with easy-to-find riding-by-riding results.
- CTV Montreal has no online coverage whatsoever. CTV.ca links to CP’s flash results.
Liveblogs:
How dare those imams?
Apparently a Liberal Muslim MNA created a bill in the legislature that some imams disagree with, and now they’re encouraging people not to vote for her.
How dare they? Denouncing a candidate because of the laws she enacts? What has this world come to?
Where are the platforms?
So voting is today in the big election. Having not finalized who I’m going to vote for, I decide to head to the media websites to find their analyses of the parties’ platforms.
Unfortunately, this is nowhere to be found.
The newspapers have actually increased coverage of this election. Every day there are pages and pages of original reporting, combined with the kind of web coverage we’ve never seen before. There are profiles of the party leaders, endless stories about poll results and missteps, riding profiles, behind-the-scenes videos, election blogs, galleries of editorial cartoons, discussion of whether “election” should be pluralized, even analyses of media coverage.
But not a single website I visited had issues analysis or party platforms in some obvious place.
The closest thing I found was this independent vote-selection wizard. Wikipedia’s French entry on the election isn’t too bad, but still no detailed information on platforms.
Unfortunate.
Maybe we aren’t so different
Kate points us to this Hour piece which has some amazingly common-sense opinions on the reasonable accomodation debate.
Bold move redux
Speaking of boneheadedly obvious newspaper endorsements, Le Devoir is officially backing the PQ, though with concerns about sovereignty, which it says must be a decision of a clear majority of Quebecers.
Election roundup
I’ll spare you the he-said- he-said- his-party-issued-a-press-release- his-party-issued-one-too-so-he-wouldn’t-be-left-out of the campaign stories today, but there are some interesting tidbits.
André Boisclair, I guess thinking that he wasn’t getting enough controversy, has decided to weigh in on the latest reasonable accomodation debate involving Muslim women that somehow has become an issue only during this election (did Muslim women not vote in 2003?). The odd thing about it is that yet again Boisclair is taking the “it’s unreasonable” side of the debate. I thought the PQ was supposed to be the left-wing party? And I thought left-wing people were pro-Muslim? They are at Concordia at least.
Then I think back to Boisclair’s major talking point: “The regions.” He’s not courting votes in Montreal, he’s going after rural communities. The poorer, Catholic, xenophobic areas like Hérouxville that could go to any of the three parties. So while his party thinks of itself as enlightened (after all, it elected an openly gay leader), he’s pushing it into Reform Party-like xenophobia.
Meanwhile, Peggy Curran is implying that activist students, who were denouncing Charest and Dumont (but didn’t seem to mention Boisclair), are taking a pro-PQ stance, despite claiming they’re not partisan. I wonder if these students agree with the PQ leader’s interpretation of what a reasonable accomodation is.
Dumont is apologizing for a candidate in Abitibi-Est whose “business” website apparently accused Jews of a worldwide financial conspiracy or something, while discussing “questions of international finance and banking in an awkward way.” Sure, if by “awkward” you mean “complete nutcase.” Oooh, let’s make all the links move back and forth and choose random colours for everything. I’ve seen 12-year-olds make better websites on MySpace. And read more coherent economic analyses from them too.
I can’t seem to find the offending text through the WayBack machine, though its latest version of the site is from a year ago.
The Gazette’s Saroj Bains has videos up of the three campaign buses: Kevin Dougherty on the Liberal bus, Hubert Bauch on the PQ bus, and Mario Dumont gives a tour of the ADQ bus. Apparently a fancy coffee machine is enough to keep the reporters in line.
Vote! Don’t vote!
Apparently Daybreak this morning had a debate between Apathy is Boring and Nous on vote pas. You can listen to it online if you have RealPlayer. But really, who uses RealAudio anymore?
Simple is effective
Andy Riga has some picks for favourite Quebec election videos, but this one (via 321Blogue) takes the cake by simply choosing some good video and creatively slowing it down to make Jean Charest and Mario Dumont appear completely wasted.
Meanwhile, at least one independent candidate (in Outremont) has a website up that puts some of the major party ones to shame. He’s financing his campaign through his videos (the sites are starting to pay contributors whose videos generate lots of traffic), but at about 150 views so far he has quite a ways to go.
UPDATE: For those worried he was left out, Drunk Boisclair is here.
Bold move from the English language daily
In a stunning first for Quebec media, The Gazette has come out in support of the new left-wing Québec solidaire party in next week’s election, heralding their bold new vision away from politics as usual.
Just kidding. They’re endorsing the Liberals. Again.
And then Charest said “talk to the hand!”
The Gazette’s Kevin Dougherty ran out of election news, so he’s telling us how the press conference went. Interesting to note that reporters pay over $6,000 plus expenses to do a tour on the campaign bus. For a 30-day tour, that amounts to $200 per day, which is about as much as these journalists get paid.
You can’t find good candidates these days
It’s a fact of life that, in those impossible ridings where your candidate will never succeed, the parties aren’t too thorough about background checks. The riding association (both of them) just picks a name out of a hat (preferably a woman/ethnic minority/young idealist), puts up some posters and waits to lose. I remember a Conservative candidate in a downtown riding who I’d known previously was a complete nutcase who used curse words even I would cringe at.
Unfortunately for Mario Dumont, a lot of candidates fit this description (long-shot, not necessarily nutcase), and their pasts are coming out to bite him in the ass. The latest, according to La Presse, is Gilles Taillon, in the Abitibi-Est riding which has swung back and forth between the PQ and Liberals.
Now Dumont doesn’t have the luxury of replacing candidates, so if he fires Taillon, he officially gives up on the riding.
Need more Quebec election stuff?
And we know you do. Ile Sans Fil’s Michael Lenczner has launched a feed aggregator which pulls from the campaign websites as well as YouTube, Flickr and del.icio.us items with “Quebec election” tags.