Federal Politics
Drainville resigned from the legislature on September 27, 1993, and declared himself an independent candidate in the 1993 federal election. He finished a distant fourth against Liberal John O'Reilly in the federal Victoria—Haliburton riding, though he did outpoll the official NDP candidate by over a thousand votes.
Drainville later realigned himself with the federal NDP, and worked within the Quebec wing. He ran as an official NDP candidate in the 1997 election in the Quebec riding of Bonaventure—Gaspé—Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Pabok, but again finished a distant fourth with only 649 votes. Until the election of 2011when the NDP won 58 seats in the province of Quebec, the NDP had been relatively weak in the province because of the power of the Bloc Québécois, and such a finish was not uncommon. Despite losing the election, he continued to speak and write publicly about social issues and electoral reform.
Read more about this topic: Dennis Drainville
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