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Québec solidaire: Who are they and what do they stand for?
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Party
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Dec 09, 2008 08:52pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| News Date | Tuesday, December 9, 2008 07:10:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | As Quebec voters all but ran Mario Dumont's Action démocratique du Quebec party out of the legislature with pitchforks and torches, an upstart party managed to stick its foot in the door.
The ADQ experienced a dramatic fall from grace in Monday's provincial election, tumbling from 39 seats and official opposition status at the start of the campaign to just seven by the time the night was through. But even more surprising was the emergence of fledgling party Québec solidaire, which became a legitimate player on the provincial political scene when party co-leader Amir Khadir upset Parti Quebecois incumbent Daniel Turp in the Montreal riding of Mercier with about 38% of the vote to nab a seat in the national assembly.
So who is the Québec solidaire and what do they stand for? According to the QS website, the broadly left-leaning party was formed by 2006 through a merger of members from the Union des forces progressistes party and the Option citoyenne political movement. The UFP was itself an amalgamation of several left-wing progressive movements, including members of Quebec's socialist democratic and communist parties. The UFP ran 75 candidates in the 2003 provincial election and won 1.5% of the vote, including a strong showing in the Mercier riding (18% of the vote) later won by the QS. The Option citoyenne was an "alter-globalization" movement founded by Françoise David, who along with Mr. Khadir is a co-leader and spokesperson of the QS.
The result of the merging of these two groups is a Québec solidaire party that describes itself as leftist, pacifist, pluralist, feminist, democratic and favour of a sovereign Quebec. The party's first foray into provincial politics saw them field a candidate in an April 10, 2006, by-election in Sainte-Marie–Saint-Jacques. Manon Massé received 22% of the vote. |
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