MONTREAL — Is recent Liberal election history in Quebec about to repeat itself? The question is on the minds of local federal insiders as they watch party fortunes flag in Justin Trudeau’s home province.

The latest CROP poll — published by La Presse on the weekend — puts the Liberals squarely behind the New Democrats across francophone Quebec.

At 23 per cent among francophone voters, Trudeau’s party is in a tight race for second place against the Bloc Québécois (21 per cent) and the Conservatives (18 per cent). The NDP has a 10-point lead.

With 50 per cent support within Quebec’s anglophone and allophone ranks, Trudeau should be able to keep the seats his party already holds in Montreal; he could even pick up a few more.

But unless the party’s standing outside the island improves, the federal Liberals could be shut out of francophone Quebec for a third consecutive election and — by the same token — fall short of the count they need to vault back to power.

And yet it was not that long ago that CROP’s polling showed the Liberals going head-to-head with the NDP for francophone support.

For many Quebec Liberal insiders there is something depressingly familiar about this pattern.

With memories of Michael Ignatieff’s own slide in popularity still fresh in Liberal minds, there is growing internal fear that once again a leader’s brain trust has invested too much in the notion that regime change will inevitably draw more Quebec voters to the Liberals.

In the lead-up to the last election, Ignatieff’s strategists correctly noted voter fatigue with both the Bloc and the Harper government but failed to factor in the possibility that the trend could benefit the NDP.

Looking to next fall, the New Democrats will go into the campaign with the added advantage of incumbency.

At the same time the regime change card is no longer the ace that it was for the Liberals when they still enjoyed a clear lead on the Conservatives nationally six months ago.

In 2011 Ignatieff took some collateral damage from the unpopularity of Jean Charest’s Liberal government.

The same trend may now be at play.

The CROP poll showed an eight-point drop from February for the provincial Liberals. They are down to 18 per cent in francophone Quebec.

The Coalition Avenir Québec — the provincial party ideologically closest to the Harper Conservatives — picked up most of that lost Liberal support.

Quebec’s electoral mood is, of course, notoriously fluid.

There are signs, for instance, that the province’s initially strong support for the Iraq mission may be shifting. An Angus Reid poll published on Monday found that Quebecers now oppose an extension of the mission by a proportion of 60 per cent.

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On the minus side for the Liberals though, the Trudeau-backed Conservative anti-terrorism legislation could similarly be losing ground in Quebec as informed criticism of Bill C-51 registers with the public.

In Quebec, it was Jack Layton’s recruitment of Mulcair — a former provincial minister with strong environment credentials — that initially caused voters to give the NDP a closer look.

With two-thirds of the Liberal candidates already chosen, there is a glaring absence of similarly commanding star recruits on Trudeau’s Quebec slate.

The same was true of Ignatieff’s 2011 lineup.

In Montreal, the party’s biggest catch for now is Mélanie Joly. In 2013, she came out of nowhere politically to finish second in Montreal’s mayoralty campaign. Now she is bidding for the Liberal nomination in the riding of Ahuntsic-Cartierville.

But Joly has acquired the reputation of a weather vane since her mayoralty bid.

In short order she has given the public her word that she was a) in municipal politics, b) in the private sector and now c) in federal politics . . . for the long haul.

Ignatieff’s fall from grace in Quebec was accelerated by Denis Coderre’s resignation as lieutenant and the latter’s contention that the party was run by Toronto advisers.

By virtue of his roots, Trudeau is less vulnerable to the same criticism. Yet his pre-election campaign in Quebec is even more generic than that of his predecessor.

That includes a just-produced string of Liberal radio ads so devoid of local flavour that if they were bagels, no Montreal shop worthy of its name would admit to having baked them.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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