Voter cynicism reigns in Quebec’s Lanaudiere region ahead of October election
JOLIETTE, Que. — Just north of Montreal, between the St. Lawrence River and the Laurentian Mountains, is a Quebec nationalist heartland where cynicism about politics reigns and labour shortages are beginning to sting.
The Lanaudiere region about an hour’s drive from downtown Montreal has a pastoral feeling to it, where farmland dominates the territory between a sprinkling of villages alongside the rivers that twist and wind through the landscape.
Citizens here helped bring the pro-independence Parti Quebecois to power in 1976 and have been represented over the decades by some of the party’s heavyweights as it traded power with the Liberals.
But support for Quebec sovereignty has been dropping since the early 2000s, the PQ has been out of power for most of the past 15 years, and voters in Lanaudiere say they feel forgotten by the power centres in Montreal and Quebec City.