Election night could be long on the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, where incumbent Joël Arseneau of the Parti Québécois and Jonathan Lapierre, who has been mayor for eight years, of the Coalition avenir Québec are engaged in a very close battle. .
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Qc125.org projections put them neck and neck throughout the campaign with 31% of the vote each, again on Sunday.
We may therefore have to wait until the wee hours of the morning for the ballots to be counted outside the constituency before declaring a winner if their number is greater than the difference in the locally collected votes of the two opponents.
However, Jonathan Lapierre does not share this analysis. “What we’re seeing is that a lot of people are going to vote and that’s excellent news,” he commented earlier Monday. We are following this methodically and we are everywhere at once like the Holy Spirit to get the attunement out! And for the rest, we don’t control the rest. I’ll be waiting for the results which I dare hope will come out around 9am, 9:15am. [NDLR: heure locale, soit 20 h, 20 h 15 dans le reste du Québec]. And we will be like everyone else: we will take note!”
Hélène Fauteux / QMI AGENCY
Joël Arseneau also does not believe that the vote will be as close as claimed. “We had a very intensive field campaign and the pulse is very positive,” he says. Our people have been busy since 10 a.m. [lundi] Tomorrow to encourage the highest possible participation rate among our backers and we think it smells good. So we have the impression that people are determined and we have a clear impression that we have a clear lead.
Air and sea transportation are priorities at both PQ Arseneau and CAQ Lapierre. Daycare places, labor and housing shortages are also key future issues for the island community.
Three other candidates are in the running, namely Gil Thériault for the Liberal Party, Jean-Philippe Déraspe for Quebec solidaire and Evan Leblanc for the Quebec Conservative Party.
Hélène Fauteux / QMI AGENCY
Note that all party leaders, with the exception of Éric Duhaime, traveled to the archipelago during the election campaign. Manon Massé toured a week after starting while Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, François Legault and Dominique Anglade waited until last week.
By the end of the afternoon, almost half of the 11,159 voters on the list of voters for the Riding of the Îles-de-la-Madeleine had exercised their right to vote. The turnout in the 2018 elections was 71.2%.
The pre-vote reached 21.14% last week. This is a growth of more than 5% since early turnout in 2018.