I live in the federal electoral district of Pontiac, which includes the rural counties and reserves of the Outaouais north and west of Gatineau, plus some suburban neighbourhoods in Gatineau. It’s about one-third anglophone, with a large concentration of rural anglophones, especially here in the namesake Pontiac MRC (an MRC is basically a county) that have much in common culturally with people on the Ontario side of the Ottawa Valley. The presence of those voters, who tend to vote Conservative, has made for some interesting electoral dynamics in the past.
Tag: Pontiac
Every election, I try to take a look at what’s happening in my own constituency. For the 2018 Quebec provincial election now underway, that constituency is Pontiac, which takes up the Pontiac MRC, the Municipality of Pontiac, and most of the Aylmer sector of Gatineau.
While on the provincial level this election promises to be one of the most interesting we’ve had in decades, the outcome in my constituency is almost certainly a foregone conclusion. Pontiac concentrates most of the Outaouais’s anglophone population and as a result is one of the safest Liberal seats off the island of Montréal.
Pontiac constituency results by percentage, 1981-2014
The only time the Liberals got less than 50 percent of the vote in the last 40 years was in 1989, when Mark Alexander of the Unity Party1 took 30.6 percent of the vote. A Liberal candidate losing here would signal a province-wide electoral wipeout.
That being said, here are the candidates I’ve been able to find out about. A new twist this time: candidates for the provincial NDP and the provincial Conservative Party, both newly established (or re-established, if you like).
- Roger Fleury (Green), an activist;
- André Fortin (Liberal), the incumbent MNA and minister of transport;
- Samuel Gendron (NDP), about whom no information as yet;
- Olive Kamanyana (Coalition Avenir Québec), a federal civil servant with a fairly impressive résumé, and the only candidate likely to provide Fortin with any real competition;
- Louis Lang (Marxist-Leninist), perennial candidate;2
- Marie-Claude Nivolon (Parti Québécois), a longtime party activist from Châteauguay who looks to be a poteau or paper candidate;3
- Kenny Roy (Conservative), a construction worker; and
- Julia Wilkie (Québec Solidaire), a student.
The election takes place on Monday, October 1.
Jane Toller has been elected warden of the Pontiac MRC, the first warden in the Pontiac’s history to be elected directly rather than selected from the MRC’s council of 18 mayors. Toller, who as Jane Pitfield served on Toronto’s city council and ran a somewhat quixotic campaign for Toronto mayor in 2006, took 46.7 percent of the vote, finishing well ahead of incumbent warden Raymond Durocher. The outgoing mayor of Fort-Coulonge took 18 percent of the vote.
Linda Davis finished third, ahead of former Pontiac MNA Charlotte L’Écuyer; onetime Calumet Island mayor Pierre Fréchette was only 40 votes behind L’Écuyer.
At the municipal level, new mayors in the Pontiac MRC include Gaston Allard in Fort-Coulonge, Maurice Beauregard in Campbell’s Bay and Serge Newberry in Île-du-Grand-Calumet. Two incumbent mayors were defeated decisively: Danielle Belec in Mansfield-et-Pontefract to Gilles Dionne, and controversial Thorne mayor Terry Murdock to Karen Daly Kelly. Several mayors were elected by very narrow margins, including Lynne Cameron of Portage-du-Fort (6 votes) and Sandra Murray of Shawville (16 votes). Only 6 of 18 mayors were elected by acclamation.
Voter turnout was extremely high for a municipal election. A total of 7,552 people voted in the warden election, which is just insane for a county whose entire population—not just those eligible to vote—was 14,251 in last year’s census.
Full results after the jump. Winners’ names are in boldface; incumbents are marked with an (i).
First, some background, so you understand what’s going on a bit better:
In Quebec, what would be called a county elsewhere is called a municipalité régionale de comté or MRC; an MRC encompasses all the towns, villages, townships and other municipalities within its boundaries (with the exception of large cities and reserves). Shawville, the municipality where I live, is part of the Pontiac MRC, which comprises a total of 18 municipalities as well as a vast unorganized territory to the north.
The head of an MRC is called a préfet (or prefect); around here that title is translated as warden. Pontiac MRC’s warden has heretofore been selected from the 18 mayors that make up the MRC’s council. But that changes this year: in Sunday’s municipal elections, the Pontiac MRC’s warden will be directly elected for the first time.
Five candidates are running. Two of them are familiar faces: Raymond Durocher is the incumbent warden and the outgoing mayor of Fort-Coulonge, a post he’s held since 1999. Charlotte L’Écuyer is the region’s former Liberal MNA: she represented the provincial district of Pontiac between 2003 and 2014. But the other three are relatively recent arrivals to the Pontiac: each has been here full-time for only three to six years.
The Pontiac’s commuter bus service—a single line running the 148 from Isle-aux-Allumettes to downtown Ottawa—was for many years run by Transport Thom. But finding out about the service took some doing: there was never a web page listing fares and schedules. (I had to go to the service station that serves as Shawville’s bus stop.) Now that the service has been taken over by Transcollines, we have that web page.
We like having friends visit, but many of them are urbanites without cars. The current schedule doesn’t necessarily solve that problem: the morning bus passes through Shawville at 6:00 and the afternoon bus leaves Ottawa’s bus terminal at 3:30 (unchanged since the Thom days). A single one-way ticket is $17. (Weekly and monthly passes are much cheaper per trip: it’s a commuter bus, after all.) There’s a reason we usually just drive in and pick people up. But Transcollines will be revamping the service next year; it’ll be interesting to see what changes.
“You’re from the city, aren’t you?”
That was the then-mayor of Shawville, watching me walk gingerly through the mud during the groundbreaking ceremony for what would soon become the village’s day care centre. It was the fall of 2003 and I was covering the event as a reporter for the local newspaper. For various reasons I lasted all of five months in that job, but it gave me a crash course in the town, the surrounding countryside and the MRC du Pontiac in general.
Yes, I was from the city—I grew up in suburban Winnipeg—but Shawville, a town of some 1,600 people, most of whom anglophone, about 75 km northwest of Ottawa, seemed somehow familiar. I spent a lot of my childhood staying with my paternal grandparents in Hartney, Manitoba, a village two thousand kilometres away and about one-third the size. But there were some similarities: both communities served as service centres for the surrounding farms. And both had demographics that tilted elderly. To me, it felt like moving to Shawville was like moving in with elderly relatives with whom you had to mind your manners and steer the conversation away from politics as much as possible, but apart from that you loved each other to bits.
The Pontiac and Ottawa Valley Writers Circle, a new group for fiction writers in my neck of the woods, is having its inaugural meeting next month in Portage-du-Fort. It seems a bit excessively structured for a group that’s just getting started, but is probably something I ought to check out — assuming they’re open to speculative fiction writers, that is. Coverage in The Daily Observer.
More than 14 months after the election is hardly the definition of timely, and it’ll be a few years before the next one, but I suddenly remembered that I meant to look at the poll-by-poll results for my electoral district, Pontiac, and see how much the vote in my particular sector — the Pontiac MRC (municipalité régionale de comté, roughly equivalent to a county) — differed from the electoral district as a whole.