MONTREAL—Justin Trudeau is not the only federal leader who could benefit from the decline of the NDP in Quebec come next fall’s general election.

The Bloc Québécois, under its latest leader, is also banking on the weakness of the New Democrats under Jagmeet Singh to help it earn back official party status in the House of Commons next fall.

It might just work.

Winning a dozen seats — up only two from the sovereigntist party’s current MP complement — might seem like a modest goal for a parliamentary group that once held the lofty title of official opposition but it was only a few months ago that the Bloc was given up for dead.

Having narrowly avoided implosion, the party has put its divisions behind it or at least set them aside to kick off the election year under a just-acclaimed new leader.

Yves-François Blanchet sat in the national assembly as a Parti Québécois member from 2008 to 2014. After his defeat, he joined the ever-expanding cast of political pundits. The experience both raised his public profile and allowed him to acquire a serious amount of federal background knowledge he might otherwise have spent the next few months trying to acquire.

In his previous political life, Blanchet spent a bit more than a year serving as premier Pauline Marois’ environment minister. With climate change expected to hold pride of place in the upcoming federal campaign those green credentials could hold him in good stead.

They could make the Bloc more attractive to the score of young voters who were drawn to Québec Solidaire’s militant environmental agenda in last fall’s provincial election.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, the sharp downturn in Parti Québécois fortunes provincially could turn out to be a saving grace for the Bloc next fall. Since 1993, the federal party has achieved its best scores at times when its sovereignist cousins were out of power in Quebec.

The more remote the possibility of another referendum on the province’s political future, the more comfortable some Quebec voters are with supporting a federal party devoted exclusively to their interests, especially if Justin Trudeau collides with Premier François Legault between now and the election.

At the same time, with a majority Coalition Avenir Québec government in place and the leaderless PQ twice removed from provincial power for at least the next few years, the survival of the Bloc has become, if only by default, job one for the sovereignty movement.

The announcement in late November that Blanchet was running for leader seems to have already had a positive impact on the party’s finances. December turned out to be its best fundraising month since the last election.

All 10 Bloc MPs have now confirmed they will be seeking re-election next fall. When it comes to holding a seat, incumbents usually have an edge on newcomers.

The first test of the Bloc’s claim that it can still bounce back from quasi-oblivion will be the Feb. 25 byelection in Outremont.

Over Thomas Mulcair’s dozen years as the Montreal riding’s MP, the Bloc’s share of the vote averaged just a bit less than 10 per cent. Over the five federal elections fought in the pre-Mulcair era, it used to average 30 per cent.

The Liberals have been counting on an NDP collapse to make gains in Quebec next fall. It is not a coincidence that both last week’s cabinet retreat and Trudeau’s prime ministerial town hall took place in New Democrat territory.

But Trudeau may have already brought home most of the Quebec voters who are liable to float between the Liberals and the NDP. In 2015, the Liberal vote in the province went up 21 points while the New Democrats’ take went down 17 points. Moreover, the prime minister’s climate change record — which Blanchet has in his sights — is hardly bulletproof.

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The notion that the Bloc could become the focus of a sovereigntist save-the-furniture bid crusade is also not good news for Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives.

Coming on the heels of the founding of Maxime Bernier’s breakaway, the possibility of a Bloc resurgence throws yet another unwelcome unknown in the Conservative party’s Quebec calculations. It does not help that the Conservative foothold in the province is in francophone territory, where the Bloc is best placed to split the non-Liberal vote.

The Bloc has been on a downward spiral for eight years and two federal elections. The next campaign is a make-or-break one for the party and — increasingly — for Quebec’s once mighty sovereignty movement. It could still upset the best-laid plans of its national rivals.

Chantal Hébert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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