MONTREAL

Somewhat misleadingly billed as a trial for the 2015 federal battle for Quebec, the byelection in the Montreal riding of Bourassa on Monday offers a few clues but about as many false leads as to how the parties are positioned for a provincewide campaign in 18 months.

Here are how the numbers stack up in the larger Quebec picture.

48 per cent is the Liberal score that Justin Trudeau’s party prevailed with. A decisive victory it certainly was, but not a landmark one. This week’s result is actually at the low end of the post-referendum Liberal scores in Bourassa. Spanning over seven federal votes, they range from a high of 65 per cent in 2000 to a low of 41 per cent in 2011. On that scale, Monday’s result places third from the bottom.

It is also virtually identical to the share of the vote (47 per cent) that Trudeau’s candidate Emmanuel Dubourg earned when he ran for the National Assembly under Jean Charest’s losing banner in Viau — the provincial riding that overlaps with Bourassa — 15 months ago.

31 per cent is the NDP score. That’s one point less than the party won in 2011 when the “orange wave” swept Quebec. At the time many had predicted that the NDP — with no roots in Quebec — would be a one-election wonder. Monday’s vote was the first test of that particular proposition and it was found wanting.

With more than two-thirds of the province’s seats, the NDP may have no other direction to go but down in Quebec in 2015 but its byelection score suggests that it will fight to hold its ground every inch of the way.

13 per cent is the Bloc Québécois score, down from 16 per cent in the last election and a new low for the sovereigntist party in Bourassa. BQ leader Daniel Paillé is right to point out that Bourassa is not truly representative of the party’s provincewide strength. His decision to oust Maria Mourani — the Bloc’s only MP to both hail from Montreal and from a cultural community — over her opposition to the PQ’s controversial values charter cannot have helped in a riding as diverse as Bourassa.

But the BQ trend line tells the larger story of a party in steady decline. Since the 1995 referendum it has gone from winning one in three votes in Bourassa to about one in 10. Monday’s score was also well under that of the provincial sovereigntist parties in Viau a year ago. Together the PQ and Québec Solidaire raked in 35 per cent of the vote in the 2012 Quebec election.

Paillé has so far failed to convince a sizeable chunk of like-minded Quebecers that his federal party still serves a useful purpose in Parliament or to make a compelling case that the NDP has not been not up to the task of representing Quebecers in the Commons.

4.6 per cent is the Conservative score, an all-time low for the party in Bourassa and half of what it won in the last election. Rarely has a party in power — provincially or federally — done so poorly in a byelection in Quebec (or elsewhere).

26 per cent may be the most important number of all. It stands for the dismal turnout in Bourassa on Monday. The lowest in the four ridings at play, it is almost 20 points below the turnout in Brandon-Souris — the Manitoba riding that was the scene of the closest contest this week.

The immediate proximity of an intensely covered Montreal municipal election did not help. But the stakes in Bourassa may also have been of more interest to political junkies and to party strategists than to the riding’s voters.

Appetite for federal regime change runs nowhere higher than in Quebec these days. But by the same token the scores of Quebecers who crave a non-Conservative government are not necessarily terribly interested in a bickering match between the NDP and the Liberals of the kind that was featured in Bourassa.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

As they prepare for the larger 2015 Quebec battle both Trudeau and Mulcair would be well advised to keep that in mind.

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

Read more about: