MONTREAL

T he federal Conservative party is no longer radioactive in Quebec. That's the main message from this week's by-election foursome. As a result, it is no longer a given that Quebecers will again stand in the way of a Conservative majority in the next general election.

Gilles Duceppe and his strategists had come to feel they had a lock on the province for as long as Stephen Harper led the Conservatives. On Monday they found out the hard way that, short of buying love, money can at least pave the way to political support.

In the former sovereignist stronghold of Montmagny-L'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup, fatigue with opposition politics decisively trumped the Bloc Québécois's anti-Conservative message.

The lure of millions of stimulus dollars and the sight of Quebec's 10 Conservative ridings awash in federal cash made a difference. On that score, the Liberal strategy of drawing attention to the Conservative spending pattern seems to have backfired, at least in Quebec.

The bad news for Duceppe is that voter fatigue with its permanent berth on the opposition side of the House of Commons is neither new nor exclusive to one Quebec riding. With no referendum in sight and in the absence of a wedge issue, the Bloc actually has few weapons to ward off the siren calls of a free-spending governing party.

Bloc strategists thought they had such an issue in the gun registry. Alone of the three opposition parties, Duceppe's caucus gave the registry its full backing in the Commons last week. But in the semi-rural areas of the Lower St. Lawrence, the registry does not have the iconic status it enjoys with the province's urban media and politicians. There is also mounting evidence that, when it comes to fighting the Bloc, the federalist parties are finally getting smart.

Earlier in the campaign, for instance, the House unanimously supported Quebec's right to ensure immigrants to the province take up French. The parliamentary vote dimmed Bloc hopes of rekindling the language debate to coast to victory in the by-elections.

And then, with the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff going nowhere fast in Quebec, federalists are looking at other options. While the Conservatives are the main beneficiaries of the Liberal vacuum outside Montreal, the NDP is picking up support on the island.

Former Liberal minister Martin Cauchon, who has set his sights on winning back his ex-riding of Outremont from NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair in the next election, might want to take note of the 20 per cent NDP score in neighbouring Hochelaga – a riding where the Liberals used to outvote the NDP by a ratio of 5 to 1 only five years ago.

In British Columbia, the NDP scored a hit with its campaign against the province's upcoming harmonized sales tax, holding on to the New Westminster-Coquitlam riding with an increased majority. It remains to be seen whether a protest vote against a provincial tax can be sustained throughout a full-fledged federal campaign but the issue does provide Jack Layton with a unique wedge against both the Liberals and the Conservatives in a crucial province for the three main parties.

By definition, a good by-election night for Harper and Layton means a sleepless one for the Liberals. There could be more to come. This was Ignatieff's first electoral test and the results are comparable to Stéphane Dion's dismal 2008 score. Against all expectations, it may be that the Liberals did not bottom out in the last election.





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Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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