Liberal candidate in Montreal byelection says campaign is not about Trudeau

In the final stretch of a Montreal byelection campaign widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberal candidate wants people to focus on her — not her leader.

The byelection in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun should have been Laura Palestini’s to lose. The area has been a Liberal bastion, by and large, for decades. A diverse riding in Montreal’s southwest, it has a large anglophone population with strong Italian roots in some neighbourhoods.

But this time, it’s hard to predict what will happen when polls close on Monday. After nine years in power, surveys show the Liberals trailing the Conservatives in every part of the country except Quebec. And even here in Montreal, a riding that should have been a given is now up for grabs.

What little polling there is suggests a three-way race between the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois. A Mainstreet Research poll this week put the Bloc in the lead.

Palestini seems to be trying not to dwell on all of that. In an interview while door-knocking in LaSalle on Thursday, she repeated several times that it’s her name on the ballot — in other words, not Trudeau’s.

“It’s about me. It’s not about the PM,” she said. “I will let myself be the … prime focus of this election.”

LaSalle is friendly turf for Palestini, and it showed when she went door to door. She spoke to an elderly woman in Italian, pointing out where to find her name on a scaled-down version of the nearly metre-long ballot voters will have to navigate on Monday.

A record 91 candidates are on the ballot for this byelection, most affiliated with a group protesting Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system. Palestini wants to be sure no one has trouble finding her in the sea of names.

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