Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Map of Quebec Election Results

I found a link to this map of the Quebec election results on quebecpolitique.com. It can be used to illustrate one aspect of the results that has not been precisely described in post-election analysis.

The ADQ seems to be fundamentally a rural party that made some suburban inroads in this election. Its strength is concentrated in central Quebec (it is represented on the map by the green colour). As these are Google maps you can zoom in and you will see that the ADQ actually won just two of Montreal's inner suburbs on the south shore (but did better in the Quebec City area). It won some of the outer suburban ridings, for example north of Laval, but these were partly rural.

It is one of the reasons I tend to view it as more like the Créditistes, or the Union Nationale. It is a rural, populist protest, without a coherent program (as a glance at their platform will tell you) in an increasingly urbanizing society. The PQ and Liberals did launch attacks on the holes in Dumonts platform, but this election was about voicing protest so they fell on deaf ears. Dumont will get closer scrutiny next time, but not winning gives him the chance to rewrite his policies into something that might resemble a program a government could live with.

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