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Battleground Quebec? The role of La Belle Provence on Oct. 19

The Canadian flag flies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa August 2, 2015. REUTERS/Blair Gable

There was a time when a political party in Canada had to win Ontario and Quebec to have any chance at a majority government.

That changed the last time around when Stephen Harper led his Conservative Party of Canada to victory with just five of the 75 seats in La Belle Provence, despite the collapse of the Bloc Québécois.

“He showed that you didn’t have to win Quebec to win the country and that’s important for a lot of reasons,” says Peter Loewen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and assistant editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

That result changed electoral strategy and the dynamics of the country, he says.

“We spent a long time in Canada giving real pride and place… to Quebec. And that’s less so now,” Loewen tells Yahoo Canada News.

“If you can win a majority without winning any seats in Quebec that obviously affects how you campaign and how you govern.”

That’s not to say Quebec doesn’t matter.

It was their overwhelming, and somewhat unexpected, success in Quebec that launched Jack Layton’s NDP into Official Opposition in 2011 with 59 seats — half the party’s caucus.

Former Conservative chief of staff David McLaughlin, in an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail this week, says in this tight election campaign, Quebec may decide who forms government, whether it will be a majority or minority and who will form the Opposition.

“Mr. Harper has proved he can win government without a significant number of Quebec seats,” he writes. “But with Conservative seats under siege in the Maritimes, Ontario and B.C., any loss of the few seats he has in Quebec can make the difference between forming government or not. It’s not a majority Conservative government at risk, it’s any Conservative government at all.”

But it may not be his own party’s fortunes that will affect Harper in Quebec.

The Conservatives are doing well in Ontario and the West – the regions that catapulted them to victory the last time around, Loewen says.

Harper needs to hang onto just 33-35 per cent of votes in order to win another majority — so long as the NDP and Liberals both perform well and hang onto their supporters, he says.

“He wants the NDP to be close because the farther back the NDP are the better the Liberals are doing,” Loewen says.

“He doesn’t want Mulcair to do too badly.”

Up until last week, NDP support in Quebec seemed fairly solid, says Claude Denis, director of the school of political studies at the University of Ottawa.

“But following the French debate, following the niqab story, it seems the NDP is softer than it looked like,” Denis tells Yahoo Canada News.

The province has become a battleground for the NDP and Liberals, he says, but then most regions have, he says.

There are 338 seats up for grabs this election, up from 308 in 2011: 78 in Quebec, 32 in Atlantic Canada, 121 in Ontario, 28 in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, 34 in Alberta, 42 in B.C. and one in each of the three territories.

“It’s true that Quebecers have been volatile in their voting, as have many other Canadians,” Denis says. “So it’s not only hard to predict, I would say it’s impossible to predict with any kind of confidence what’s going to happen, not only in Quebec but in other places as well.”

The national polling numbers don’t have the full picture because many battles are very local, the electorate very fragmented.

“With another three weeks to go until the vote, I think a lot can still happen.”