Rookie MP at 20, Laurin Liu now fights to hold NDP ground in Quebec
When Laurin Liu was elected to Parliament at the age of 20, she didn’t know how to drive.
Soon she became known here, in the Montreal suburb at the heart of her constituency, for riding a bicycle to appointments around town. Locals called her “the bike MP.”
“It was great,” she said recently, putting a characteristically cheerful spin on the situation. “People would see me and wave from their cars.”
At that stage of her political career, gaining a reputation was worth whatever embarrassment it might entail. One of the four McGill undergraduates swept into the House of Commons more or less accidentally by Quebec’s Orange Wave in 2011, she was all but unknown in Saint-Eustache.
A so-called pylon candidate, Ms. Liu put her name on the ballot as a formality; she was not expected to be remotely competitive against a Bloc Québécois juggernaut that had dominated Montreal’s north shore for more than a decade. On polling day, while she was volunteering for Thomas Mulcair’s re-election campaign, a friend texted her the results from Rivière-des-Mille-Îles.
Ms. Liu had won the seat by nearly 11,000 votes.
She now drives a used Toyota Corolla, a little anxiously, and with the not-always-sufficient navigational help of a GPS. But if the car protests a little when accelerating onto the highway, and if it has hand cranks to roll down the windows, it still counts as evidence of her remarkable maturation.
The youngest woman ever elected to Parliament is now a crucial part of the NDP’s strategy to hold Quebec. While the party needs to dramatically expand its footprint in Ontario and British Columbia if it has any hope of dispatching the Harper Conservatives, keeping the support of la belle province is an equally tough trick.
The NDP’s support here, while broader than that of the other parties combined, is also unusually shallow. Of the party’s 54 Quebec MPs, 53 are rookies. Their job in October will be to prove that 2011 wasn’t, as many have charged, a feu de paille – a flash in the pan.
Saint-Eustache is impeccably Québécois. The town hall used to be a convent. The church has dimples in its walls from British cannonballs fired during the 1837 rebellion. Fleurs-de-lys pennants hang from the lampposts downtown. A typical Eustachois is, roughly: 65, white, Catholic, francophone and separatist.
A Chinese-Canadian anglophone born in Calgary, Ms. Liu cuts a striking figure in town. Her noticeable anglo accent adds to that air of incongruity. Although she went to a French community college in Montreal, and is now much more comfortable in her second language than she was four years ago, she gives herself away as an outsider the moment she says bonjour.
Ms. Liu’s reception, generally warm, has sometimes been marred by ugly remarks about age and race. At a community event one night early in her tenure, a former Bloc MP for the riding, Gilles Perron, repeatedly referred to Ms. Liu as la petite Chinoise. (She insists the incident was “in no way representative of my general experience.” Mr. Perron could not be reached for comment.)
But despite all the superficial differences between them, many of her constituents seem to have embraced their young MP. She was greeted enthusiastically in the streets of Saint-Eustache on the first day of electioneering last Sunday – “Bonne chance,” exclaimed one woman, holding up two firmly crossed fingers – and has the foursquare support of local groups such as the Lions Club.
She has earned this improbable foothold by heeding Jack Layton’s advice to the crop of novice parliamentarians he almost single-handedly created: Spend lots of time in your riding.
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