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With three of Canada’s five federal party leaders running in Montreal ridings, inner city districts could wind up with some serious clout after the Oct. 19 vote.

Party chiefs generally walk away with their home ridings, but that isn’t always the case. Though polls suggest Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has a nearly insurmountable lead in Papineau, the New Democratic Party’s Tom Mulcair and the Bloc Québécois’ Gilles Duceppe appear to be in for a fight on election night.

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Much was made of an NDP-commissioned poll, released last month, that saw their candidate Anne Lagacé Dowson ahead of Trudeau by 11 percentage points in Papineau. At the time the Liberals were still struggling to get out of third place, nationally, and the NDP appeared poised to form a minority government.

But now the momentum has shifted dramatically both in the federal and local race. The latest polls suggest Trudeau has the support of 52.9 per cent of Papineau voters versus just 18 per cent for Lagacé Dowson — according to the poll-aggregating website ThreeHundredEight.com.