Weekly Writ 5/28: Can the Liberals hold Guilbeault's seat?
Plus, Alberta's Danielle Smith opts for a referendum.
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Steven Guilbeault, the one-time environment minister and long-time environmental activist, made it official on Wednesday that he’ll resign his seat of Laurier–Sainte-Marie later this summer and end his tumultuous time as an MP.
His departure will undoubtedly please some of those on the right who saw him as the embodiment of everything that stood in the way of Canada’s energy industry. After making many compromises over the years, his departure might not sadden as many environmentalists and those who care about combating climate change as it would have a few years ago. He left Mark Carney’s cabinet over the MOU with Alberta back in November, so what little influence he still had left over the Liberal government was already long gone.
Guilbeault did not leave in a huff, however. He’s going to stay on in the Liberal caucus until after Parliament adjourns for the summer and the letter announcing his resignation did not criticize the Carney government beyond implying that he can have more of an impact on the climate file outside of the House of Commons.
Keeping the environmental wing of the Liberal Party within the tent will remain a challenge for Carney, though to date he seems to have managed it well enough. The Liberals are polling better than they did when Guilbeault quit cabinet in November and surveys suggest that Canadians have had a change of heart from the days when Guilbeault was first elected when it comes to prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth. In some ways, Guilbeault was a product of his time — he was a star candidate for the Liberals when the environment was a top issue once again. The pandemic, the cost of living crisis and the re-election of Donald Trump pushed climate change down on the list of Canadians’ priorities, where it now remains. Once a star, Guilbeault might have become a liability.
There are broader vulnerabilities on this file that Mark Carney will eventually have to face in the coming years, but the immediate challenge will be when the vacancy in Laurier—Sainte-Marie has to be filled. Without Guilbeault, can the Liberals hold the seat?
This riding is located in downtown Montreal (and includes the Vieux Montréal, which most tourists to the city have passed through). It is a dense, city-centre riding, the kind of riding that the Liberals hold throughout Canada. In downtown Montreal, only the neighbouring (and also soon to be vacant) riding of Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie isn’t already a Liberal bastion.
Guilbeault won Laurier—Sainte-Marie with 52.1% of the vote in the last election, beating the NDPs Nimâ Machouf by a margin of 33 points. This was Machouf and Guilbeault’s third face-off in the riding. He beat her by 17 points in 2019 and five points in 2021.
There’s no doubt Guilbeault was a star for the party in 2019. He boosted the Liberals that year by 18 points in Laurier–Sainte-Marie compared with the 2015 result, a far bigger spike than in neighbouring ridings where the Liberals were only up three or four points.
But his star might have faded by 2021. His drop of nearly four points in the riding was a little bigger than the losses suffered by Liberal candidates in neighbouring seats. His gain of 14 points in 2025 was only marginally bigger than those of neighbouring Liberal incumbents, Rachel Bendayan and Marc Miller. While the 2019 result suggested some star power, the 2021 and 2025 results suggested Guilbeault wasn’t performing much better than a typical Liberal incumbent.
This would suggest that his departure might not hurt the Liberals all that much, assuming they can find a good replacement.
They should be considered the favourite to hold this — and potentially quite comfortably. That’s because if the Liberals don’t win it, who would? The NDP has not shown signs of any serious momentum under Avi Lewis, particularly in Quebec. They would need to find a stellar candidate to flip a 33-point margin and that simply doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the party right now.
The Bloc? This was once a stronghold for the party and the site of its first electoral victory when Gilles Duceppe won a byelection in 1990. But the riding swung to the NDP in 2011 and was one of the 16 in Quebec that stayed with the party in 2015. Duceppe was defeated both times. Under his leadership, the party had a lot of support among urban progressives in Montreal. But, under Yves-François Blanchet, the party no longer has the same level of support on the island of Montreal. In 2008, the Bloc held six seats on the island and won more than 20% of the vote in four others. In 2025, it won one and cracked 20% in only two more.
Unless either the NDP or the Bloc can find a candidate that is able to win this seat solely due to their own profile, the Liberals look likely to hold Laurier—Sainte-Marie.
Whether they can hold the voters that once looked to Guilbeault as a standard bearer of their movement within the Liberal Party is another question entirely — one that likely won’t be answered for some time yet.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the Alberta referendum (and what it means for Danielle Smith’s leadership of the UCP) and the upcoming B.C. Conservative leadership vote. Plus, two ridings will keep their Indigenous names after all, the OLP gains a leadership contestant and rebuffs Nate Erskine-Smith, Caroline Mulroney resigns, Éric Duhaime chooses a riding and Nova Scotia calls a byelection. Lots of news!
Polls suggest the dip in Liberal support in last week’s trackers might have been nothing, plus how voters in 11 Liberal ridings feel about pipelines, how voters in Ontario feel about Doug Ford and how voters in Nova Scotia feel about Tim Houston.
#EveryElectionProject: The 1902 Ontario election that was won by a margin of five votes.
NEWS AND ANALYSIS
Question on independence added to Alberta referendum
In the least surprising turn of events ever, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has added a 10th, independence-adjacent question to the nine questions Albertans were already going to vote on in the October 19 provincial referendum. While the idealist might see this move as a way to give Albertans their democratic say on the future of the province, it doesn’t take much of a cynic to believe that this referendum is, instead, about internal party dynamics within the increasingly-ironically named United Conservative Party.