Seriously thinking of doing heatmaps for at least the former, and I suppose some federal election maps too.
A promise long forgotten is fulfilled.
In 1985, Robert Bourassa was elected Premier of Quebec in a landslide victory over the ailing Parti Québecois, which had been defeated in their ambitions for sovereignty and seen the retirement of their leader and founder René Lévesque. Now, Bourassa's Liberal Party could count on near-monolithic support from anglophones and allophones (people whose first language is neither English nor French), who for understandable reasons have tended to be put off by sovereigntism, but the reason they were able to
win was that francophone ridings which had supported the PQ under Lévesque turned to the Liberals. Bourassa was highly conscious of this fact, and while it's unclear to what extent Bourassa believed in much of anything, he was probably some kind of soft Quebec nationalist himself. During his first stint as Premier he'd attempted to dilute PQ support by passing laws supporting French language use, and he returned to power determined to defend Bill 101, the PQ's landmark achievement in government which declared French the sole official language of the province and imposed strict limitations on the use of English by government ans business alike.
This became significant following the
Ford v Quebec case in 1988, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that it was unconstitutional to require Montreal shop owners to display signage in French only. The ruling met with outcry from Quebec nationalists of all stripes, and Bourassa's government responded by making minor alterations to Bill 101 and then invoking the "notwithstanding clause", a legal instrument in the Canadian constitution that allows a province to formally disregard judicial review. This is typically only done in extreme cases, and the invocation proved just as controversial as the ruling itself. Montreal anglophones suddenly found themselves unable to trust the Liberal Party, and in the spring of 1989, as Quebec prepared to hold provincial elections, they formed their own political movement to advocate a return to bilingualism on the provincial level.
The actual party affiliation of these "anglophone" candidates (for lack of a better term) was divided: in Montreal, eighteen candidates stood under the banner of the Equality Party (
Parti Égalité), while sixteen candidates stood outside the metropolitan area under the Unity Party (
Parti Unité). The former had some success, winning four seats and effectively depriving the Liberals of their stronghold on the West Island for the first time in decades. That being said, Bourassa won a second majority government, and Quebec was hardly moving in a federalist direction - Bourassa carried on Lévesque's attempts at negotiating a new constitutional settlement that would give Quebec expanded rights within Canada, which failed spectacularly by around 1990, and the next few years would see a massive revival for the sovereigntist movement. With the PQ resurgent, Montreal anglophones closed ranks behind the Liberals once again (it helped that Bourassa retired in 1993). The Equality Party died on its arse, never to return, but just as they'd won in spite of Montreal in 1989, they would lose in spite of Montreal in 1994.