The Globe is visiting communities across the country to hear from Canadians about the issues affecting their lives, their futures and their votes in this federal election.
Betty Boop, Bavarde, and Blues were swinging their tails in the barn of a dairy farm in Trois-Rivières, near the St. Lawrence River. Cows with B names are the star milkers of the herd, explained Chantal Leclerc, the third-generation co-owner of this family business.
At election time, Ms. Leclerc typically votes for the Bs, too, like a plurality of her neighbours in the city. The Bloc Québécois have won eight of the 10 elections in urban Trois-Rivières since the party’s creation in 1993, buoyed by a traditionalist and nationalist streak in the city of 140,000. It was even once famously home of the late Premier and defender of old-school Quebec values, Maurice Duplessis.
Chantal Leclerc has been rethinking her political choices during a trade war where dairy supply management has come under intensifying scrutiny.
But despite Ms. Leclerc’s loyalty to the province, she has other ideas this time around.
The trade war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump, and his fixation on cracking open Canada’s heavily protected dairy market, have turned her into an anxious news junkie consuming reports from multiple countries. (“Sometimes I go, ‘Ahhhh, I have to stop!’”)
She may be the great-niece of sovereigntist hero and chansonnier Félix Leclerc – an ancestral home on the property serves as a bed-and-breakfast popular with fans of the late singer-songwriter – but right now she supports Mark Carney, the Alberta-raised financier with shaky French.
“It’s the economic side of him that I like; he’s calm and he doesn’t talk for nothing,” Ms. Leclerc said. “Trump is unpredictable and I think he’s a bit of a liar. He’s playing with us all like puppets … Now I think Canada needs to be as united as possible.”
In a city sometimes seen as an insular distillation of the Quebec heartland, global concerns are in the air these days.
Trois-Rivières is among the 10 Canadian cities most exposed to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, according to a February report by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, thanks to its role as a major port for the aluminum and forestry sectors. Mayor Jean Lamarche believes 80 per cent of the federal campaign will be dominated by “international relations.”
Trifluviens have always had an “ambivalent” attitude to outsiders, said the local historian Jean-François Veilleux, torn between “the conservation and protection of culture and openness to the world.”
Our Lady of the Cape, dedicated to the Virgin Mary in 1888, is one of many Catholic holy sites to be built in Trois-Rivières.
Located halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, Trois-Rivières is full of such paradoxes, alternately inward- and outward-looking. The second-oldest city in Quebec, it mostly burned down in 1908, leaving just a fragment of the old town, including an imposing domed Ursuline monastery. A more modern downtown features a Delta hotel and sleek convention centre.
Home to a dense cluster of religious orders and a former stronghold of ultramontane Catholicism in the province, it was also the birthplace of Ezekiel Hart, one of the first Jews elected to public office in the British Empire, whose family is still honoured with a prominent street name.
While Mr. Duplessis presented the city as an unchanging epitome of traditional Quebec, rapid industrialization was turning it into the pulp-and-paper capital of the world, whose mills exported the newsprint used by The New York Times.
“It’s a concentrate of Quebec,” said Jonathan Livernois, author of books about Mr. Duplessis and Gérald Godin, another prominent politician from Trois-Rivières.
Traditionally, local politics were carried out on an intimate scale, and at election time even a figure as grand as Premier Duplessis went around handing out coins to poor kids while asking after their parents.
“It’s a politics of proximity,” said Prof. Livernois, who teaches literature at Laval University in Quebec City. “Power is very familiar, very incarnated.”
The Liberals are testing that precept by parachuting in a federal civil servant from the Ottawa region who was chosen for the riding so late she didn’t have time to print election posters until last week.
Caroline Desrochers is a career diplomat and Global Affairs Canada executive living in Chelsea, Que., who is betting her foreign affairs experience will override her outsider status.
As if to underscore her good fortune in running under the dominant political banner this campaign, a red-and-white ship named Federal Frontier was anchored in the St. Lawrence during a recent visit to the city’s bustling port, photo-op-ready.
Ms. Desrochers was fortunate to find a ship in Liberal colours at the port today.
The Liberal strategy seems to be working. Local polls put her in a close three-way race with the Conservatives and the Bloc in a riding that hasn’t gone Grit since the 1980s.
The mayor did Ms. Desrochers a favour last week when he released an open letter calling for voters to look past her lack of local bona fides and questioning the Conservative candidate Yves Lévesque’s commitment to the high-speed train widely seen as crucial to the city’s future.
Trois-Rivières needs the train to keep the “wind in its sails,” Mr. Lamarche said – a sense of momentum that hasn’t been a given in recent decades. The closing of many pulp-and-paper mills starting in the 1970s plunged the city into years of postindustrial malaise and high unemployment that can still be seen in tougher parts of the city where homelessness and drug abuse are visible issues.
Mayor Jean Lamarche speaks highly of Trois-Rivières's economic resilience, and believes high-speed rail could be vital to its future.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
Now the jobless rate is around the Canadian average and the big challenge is building enough housing for the young families and retirees moving to the city. A modern neighbourhood is now being planned on the site of a disused aluminum factory near the three-channelled delta of the Saint-Maurice River that gives the city its name.
The closing of the factories and the city’s rebirth have made its residents “resilient,” the mayor said.
But it also taught Trifluviens the experience of having their cozy slice of Quebec shaken by outside economic forces. The anxiety of the trade war has made workers jumpy, prompting a metal-worker’s union to declare that an aluminum plant in neighbouring Bécancour was closing because of the tariffs in early March, only to retract the announcement hours later when it became clear the closing was temporary.
Éric Drolet, president of a union local representing about 1,000 aluminum workers in the area, said he hoped the industry’s dependence on cheap Quebec hydro-electricity would protect jobs in Trois-Rivières, but that he couldn’t be sure. It isn’t the first time the city has found itself torn between the safety of its roots and the turbulent currents of the wider world.
“For the moment there is no slowdown, but will there be?” Mr. Drolet said. “We’re in the unknown like no one has seen before.”
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