5 to 41?
How does a party go from having five seats before an election to electing 41 candidates and becoming the Official Opposition? Unbelievable! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you l'Action Democratique du Quebec and the latest provincial election. I'm sorry I missed most of it, I was busy with the final school projects, but it sounded like a really fierce battle. With a 71% turnout, I somehow doubt the words of a Radio-Canada presenter this weekend who said people were turned-off by this election, lacked enthusiasm for the candidates.
I was at a workshop tonight. One of the students had a laptop and was monitoring the results. Out of the blue, he pointed to the letters "ADQ" written on his printout. I wasn't thinking about elections, I was thinking about presentation skills (that was the subject of the workshop), so I didn't clue in. He then wrote "ADQ vs Liberals" and then I got it. That's when he said the ADQ was leading in the polls. I couldn't believe it!
But I digress, I should be working on the final edits for our last paper of the semester.
Still... Unbelievable.
I was at a workshop tonight. One of the students had a laptop and was monitoring the results. Out of the blue, he pointed to the letters "ADQ" written on his printout. I wasn't thinking about elections, I was thinking about presentation skills (that was the subject of the workshop), so I didn't clue in. He then wrote "ADQ vs Liberals" and then I got it. That's when he said the ADQ was leading in the polls. I couldn't believe it!
But I digress, I should be working on the final edits for our last paper of the semester.
Still... Unbelievable.
Labels: Quebec elections, skills
1 Comments:
At 1:31 AM,
Theobald Tiger said…
Hi Melissa:
This is a real breakthrough for the ADQ to be sure, but not as much of a surprise or overnight success as the mainstream media would have you believe. In fact, they've been growing in support for a long time: 11.8% in 1998 (1 seat), 18.2% in 2003 (5 seats), 30.8% on Monday (41 seats).
The problem is our current electoral system that punishes emerging parties - with 18.2% of the vote, the ADQ should have received about 20 seats in 2003, but their supporters were denied effective representation by the voting system.
Whatever one thinks of his platform, it is a tribute to the intelligence and personal charisma of Mario Dumont that the ADQ is still around and now a true political force. Most parties under similar circumstances would have faded away long since.
- S.
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