Greens' Daoust sees second-place finish

"Here in Westmount and further west, we expect to do really well," he said in an interview with the Examiner. "I wouldn't be surprised at all if we beat the Parti Québécois here —if we become the second party in Westmount."

Daoust maintains the Green Party stands to increase its share because voters in Westmount-St. Louis will be facing a dilemma when deciding who to support on March 26.

"Because there's always the 'question nationale,' the referendum question, coming back, it's sort of an attempt to cage people into the idea of voting Liberal in order for the PQ not to come to power," he said. "But people have become sick of that. They feel like they're disenfranchised completely, and here in Westmount, people really feel like they're being taken for granted.

"So they're looking for another option. They're not going to vote for the Parti Québécois. For some reason, a lot of them aren't comfortable with Mario Dumont. They're certainly not going to vote for Québec Solidaire because they've also said they're for sovereignty … There's been a lot of talk about the environment, so people are really becoming worried about it and I think that's obviously going to help us a lot."

Alluding to the dilemma the Quebec government faces because of its ongoing involvement in the gambling industry, Daoust said the Green Party would likely put an end to the association because of an overall philosophy on sustainable development.

"Because there's money to be made in gambling, the government of Quebec has promoted it strongly," he said. "The problem, though, is that nobody has done a really solid cost analysis to say, well, what are all the social costs with promoting gambling within a society? …

"It's going to end up being more of a social cost when you think about broken families, suicides, all the other social costs that are being picked up by the health care system, by social services, by all the other aspects of society. There's not a proper calculation of all of that. That's an example of the fact we're not using interdependence and we're not looking at systems dynamics, which are fundamental ideas of the Green Party."

While the Liberals are currently highlighting a campaign pledge to meet Quebec's Kyoto Protocol objectives for greenhouse gas emissions, Daoust says the ruling government isn't being truthful. "What Kyoto specifically says is that between 2008 and 2012, those six years have to be on average at levels of six per cent below 1990," he said.

In fact, he maintains, the objective will only be reached by the deadline date. "Which means they're going to make exactly 62.5 per cent of the Kyoto objective. So although they're going to get to where they should be, they're going to be six years too late and they're not making out the average."