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The potato sack race for the Quebec Liberal leadership got off to a stumbling start this week. And, because of the voting system that will be used in the election, it could end with a winner that most of the party’s members don’t want.

The issue that has dominated media coverage and commentary in the early days of the official campaign leading to the election next May is the ethnicity of the first declared candidate, Dominique Anglade, who is of Haitian descent.

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(Ignore those uselessly premature poll results published three days into the six-month official campaign suggesting that Anglade is running third, behind “don’t know/didn’t answer” and Denis Coderre. Flattering though they may be to the attention-craving Coderre, the conventional wisdom in political circles is that if he’s campaigning for anything, it’s his old job as mayor of Montreal in 2021.)

And the second candidate who is supposed to give the party both a contested campaign and an alternative to Anglade started the race by doing a faceplant.