By Gordon Lambie
There are seven candidates on the ballot in the Sherbrooke federal riding this September, including representatives from the Bloc Quebecois, Liberal Party, Conservative Party, New Democratic Party, Green Party, People’s Party, and the Free Party. The riding is made up of the Des Nations and Fleurimont boroughs of Sherbrooke and is surrounded, on all sides, by the riding of Compton-Stanstead.
Sherbrooke’s political history on the federal level has been mixed, with representation from the Progressive conservative party under Jean Charest from 1984 to 1998, then from the Bloc Quebecois under Serge Cardin from 1998 to 2011. The riding then went to the NDP in the “orange wave”, electing Pierre-Luc Dusseault as the youngest MP in the country’s history, and then gave him a second mandate in 2015 even as his party’s support in Quebec dwindled. In 2019, the people of Sherbrooke elected their first Liberal member of Parliament since 1984 in Elizabeth Brière.
The riding was a slim three-way split in that most recent election between the Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc Quebecois, leaving many to wonder which way the vote will go just under two years later.
Although Brière said that her first session in office was a strange one, taking place primarily under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, she nonetheless said that she feels proud of work that her office did on protecting the waters of Lake Memphremagog and getting renovation work moving on the local armouries.