Justin Trudeau launches his campaign

Even a tiny victory on the island would be something while the Conservatives are sweeping the rest of the province.

There are two parts to Montreal. The east is Bloc Québécois; the west is solid Liberal. And along the cusp in between, that’s where the real political battles are fought.

Meanwhile off the island, the Bloc and the Conservatives are fighting it out for the rest of the province.

Right now the Bloc holds 44 of the 75 seats across Quebec, the Liberals and Conservatives each have 11 seats – it’s a tie -- and the New Democrats have a single seat, Outremont.

But the Bloc is vulnerable. Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he can pick up 10 to 15 Bloc seats out in the regions, and a lot more if there is a blue tide.

He is looking at the Quebec City area, the Chaudière-Appalaches, the Eastern Townships and the Lower South Shore.

The public opinion polls all show Harper the big winner in this election, finally getting the majority he could only dream about for the past 13 years. The polls have him twice and three times as popular as Stéphane Dion and even more popular than Gilles Duceppe in Quebec. For a guy from Alberta, that’s saying something.

But elections have a way of starting off one way and ending up another. Talk to Kim Campbell, She started off as the most popular prime minister in Canadian history going into the 1993 election with 205 seats – the most ever – and ended up with only two seats and hers was not one of them. Where is she now?

The upcoming campaign marks the political entry of Justin Trudeau

While his wife Sophie is four months pregnant, expecting their second child, Trudeau is running in north central Papineau riding, won by Bloc Québécois MP Vivian Barbot in 2006 by a knife-edge margin of two percent against cabinet minister Pierre Pettigrew.

Papineau is 305th among 308 ridings in Canada in family income. Not good. Many people here work hard for next to nothing. Forty per cent are immigrants. Less than half speak French as their first language. Life is not easy.

Mme Barbot, a university teacher born in Haïti knows her voters, but they know the Trudeau name and the magic it carries. In a place such as Papineau, it’s good to dream of a better life. It should be quite a fight.

In nearby north-central Ahuntsic, the riding of Chabanel Street clothing factories, Liberal Eleni Bakopanos and Bloquiste Maria Mourani are running against each other for the third time in a row. Sort of like an Olympic marathon.

Bakopanos won in 2004; Mourani won in 2006. Who wins this time? One thing is for sure. The riding is good to women politicians. Jeanne Sauve and Monique Bégin were both elected here.

Watch the riding of Jeanne-Le Ber, down in the Verdun, St. Henri and Point St. Charles part of town. This was Liza Frulla’s riding until she lost convincingly in 2006 to the Bloc’s rising star Thierry St. Cyr.

Frulla wanted to run in neighboring LaSalle-Émard, Paul Martin’s old riding, but Dion said no, so she’s sitting this one out, doing a lot of television.

The Conservatives are ready to go all out to make sure the Liberals don’t win back Jeanne-Le Ber. This is one to watch.

The race in that old Liberal bastion Outremont, now in the hands of New Democrat Thomas Mulcair, would have been a lot more interesting if Martin Cauchon, the former justice minister who used to be the MP, had chosen to run again.

Cauchon, touted as a successor to Dion, thought thought it over, then decided against it. The Bloc and the Conservatives are not in the race. For them it’s anybody but a Liberal. This suits Mulcair just fine. As for Cauchon, there go his leadership plans.

At the most, the Liberals can hope to win four more seats on the island. Most likely, they’ll get two extra seats or maybe nothing at all.

But considering ther's a great blue tsunami washing over Quebec off the island, the Liberals will be happy with whatever they can get in Montreal, and the Bloc will be happy just to hang on with what they’ve got.



Mr. Cléroux welcomes comments at richardcleroux@rogers.com