“When someone who is a member of the Bloc approaches us to ask questions, am I right to say we welcome them with open arms?”
Antoine Tardif, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s late 20-something director of Quebec operations, smiles at the question from a party organizer. Tardif, who has been in the job since summer 2017, is more than hoping Quebec sovereigntists feel welcomed in the Tory tent, he is openly courting them.
“There are some people who are asking themselves questions but they are a bit afraid to talk to us,” the organizer from Jonquière, Que. continues. The Bloc Québécois members are a huge assets, he noted, they’re organized and active on the ground — and there are a lot of them!
“Those people, they are looking for a home.”
Scheer’s camp is hoping the Tories can be that political home. With the NDP polling around 16 per cent and the Bloc Québécois almost non-existent — Scheer jokingly thanked its former leader Martine Ouellet for driving her party into the ground during his keynote speech at the Tories’ policy convention — the Conservatives sense a unique opportunity.
For the first time since the 1988 federal election, Quebec looks to be a fight between only two parties. If Scheer has any shot of forming government in 2019 — something his advisers conceded is a long shot but increasingly a possibility — the Tories need to win big in Quebec.
The party hopes to double its current 11 seats in the province, Marc-André Leclerc, Scheer’s chief of staff, told HuffPost Canada’s political podcast, “Follow-Up.” But the public pronouncements are a lowball, and he knows it.
“We need to get maybe 20, 25, 30 seats in Quebec, you know, this is key for us,” he said, with a grin.
Listen to Tory insiders on “Follow-Up”:
In the francophone ridings targeted by the Tories, the Liberals hover around the 35 to 36 per cent mark, Leclerc said, while the Conservatives poll around 29 to 30 per cent. “So that means a lot of seats in Quebec.”
“If you are looking at maybe 10 months ago, people were thinking ‘No, never, Andrew Scheer [in] 2019. Never. Good luck. See you in 2023,” Leclerc said. But following Trudeau’s widely mocked trip to India, he said, things are looking up for the Tories.
With 78 of the country’s 338 seats, Quebec could easily determine who forms government next year. The Liberals currently have 40 seats there and the party is hoping the province could help offset any losses in the rest of the country; perhaps in Atlantic Canada, where they’re unlikely to repeat the sweep of seats there in the last election.
So it’s no coincidence the Tories are spending a lot of time, money and energy courting the province’s voters.
“There are a lot of people who just don’t want Justin Trudeau anymore,” Tardif told a crowd of 40 or so organizers and would-be delegates assembled in the basement of the Halifax Convention Centre where the Conservatives held their biennial conference over the weekend.
